Centro Televisivo Vaticano
The Catholic hierarchy can be awfully selective as to who gets targeted by their "guidance."Within days of Donald Trump’s November landslide, Bishop Mark Seitz, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ migration committee, warned that Their Eminences were preparing to “’raise our voice loudly’” if Trump’s immigration policy “’violates basic human rights.’”
This episcopal loudness signals the end of the USCCB’s scrupulously-maintained four-year vow of silence through the entire presidency of the “devoutly” Catholic Joe Biden.
Their silence spoke volumes to Catholics witnessing Biden doing his utmost to wage open war on the most fundamental teachings of the Church. Not only was this “‘good Catholic’” (Biden claimed Pope Francis described him this way during a 2021 audience), the most extreme pro-abortion president in history, but his DoJ used federal law enforcement to imprison peaceful pro-lifers, and target traditional Catholics as “potential domestic terrorists.”
Biden proclaimed “transgender equality” to be “the civil rights issue of our time,” and weaponized his administration to pressure international medical experts to abandon limits on trans surgeries for minors. He transformed the White House lawn into a Pride Celebration freakshow of gender deviants, which went viral thanks to one particularly repulsive “transgender woman” flashing his fake breasts for the cameras.
None of this stirred the USCCB to “raise its voice loudly.”
Now, the Vatican has released Pope Francis’s letter empathizing with American bishops “in these delicate moments that you are living as Pastors of the People of God.”
The “delicate moments” of another Trump presidency.
“I have followed closely,” Francis writes,
the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.
One Catholic newspaper calls the pope’s letter “unprecedented,” as “[i]t is unusual for a pope to directly attack a particular policy of a particular government, especially a democracy.”
Not so unusual for this pope. The prelate who famously replied, “who am I to judge?” when asked about gay Catholics in the confessional, stridently attacked the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel, implying last November that “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.”
This January, (during a cordial sit-down with none other than the Iranian cleric overseeing the persecution of Christian converts), Francis said, “our only problem is with Benjamin Netanyahu, who, regardless of International laws and human rights, has created crises in the region and the world” — including “want[ing[ to enslave people and humanity.”
Nor has Trump, for whom Francis harbors an especially venomous (and unpriestly) animosity, ever been safe from his personal attacks.
Months before Trump won the GOP nomination in 2016, Francis was already denouncing him to reporters for wanting to secure the border: “‘A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel,’ the pope said…’ This man is not Christian if he has said things like that.’”
If “this is not the gospel” is the standard, then abortion, trans ideology, and depriving the Little Sisters of the Poor of their conscience rights qualify even better. But President Biden’s flagrant defiance of Catholic teaching has never drawn public reproach from Francis, let alone a pronunciamento that those views make him “not Christian.”
<img alt captext="Centro Televisivo Vaticano” class=”post-image-right” src=”https://conservativenewsbriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/shepherds-of-the-church-why-the-double-standard.jpg” width=”450″>Francis’s harshest words for Biden came in a 2022 Univisión interview, when he described President Biden, as a Catholic favoring legal abortion, as an “incoherence.” He would leave it to Biden’s “conscience,” he said. “’Let (Biden) talk to his pastor about that incoherence.’”
But the moral incoherence is Pope Francis’s answer. Biden remorselessly promotes the most radical protection and expansion of the abortion license, in direct contradiction to the unchanging teaching of the Church that intentional abortion is “an intrinsically evil act that can never be morally right.”
How can the pope, (as Catholics believe, both St. Peter’s successor and therefore Universal Pastor) simply hand Biden back to the same unaided conscience that already shipwrecked his faith?
The “intrinsically evil” nature of intentionally killing an innocent human being is perfectly clear. Many moral issues are not, as Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky explains at The Catholic Thing: “Christian first principles — the dignity of the human person and the Commandments — intersect. But the overlap — unlike the politics of direct abortion — is partial and open to debate.” There’s wide freedom for civil leaders, or Catholics in general, to exercise prudence in deciding such matters.
It’s true the Church has always insisted on protections for the natural rights of migrants fleeing genuine perils; but, unlike abortion, the Church has never taught deporting illegal aliens or enforcing national borders “can never be morally right.”
This means Catholics in good conscience can hold opposing views on how best to manage migration. Even views that vary from the Vatican and the USCCB.
But you wouldn’t know this from the pope’s letter to the American bishops. Fully aware that many laypersons would also be reading his letter, Pope Francis forbids any other choice for the “rightly formed conscience” than to “express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”
Last October, a survey of Catholic Trump supporters showed an astounding 76 percent agreeing with the statement, “I support Trump because of his stance on immigration.” Are Pope Francis and the American bishops really telling all these Catholics their consciences are “wrongly-formed”? and their sole recourse is to renounce MAGA and embrace the Left’s disastrous erasure of our national borders?
This is a grave indictment. Yet, for some reason, Catholic Democrats are spared such pastoral rebukes. On one side we have a formal papal letter effectively anathematizing any Catholic who agrees with deporting illegal immigrants; on the other, an offhand interview remark entrusting President Biden’s intransigent abortion extremism to his “‘good Catholic’” conscience.
As far as the bishops go, too much of this incoherence is the fruit of Marxist thought prevalent in Catholic seminaries in the 1960s. The USCCB’s one-sided social-justice hectoring exemplifies Herbert Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance” — “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”
Millions of Catholics, watching how their bishops publicly fawn over politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden — whose progressive views on climate change or income redistribution they share — infer falsely that “good Catholic” and “good Democrat” are interchangeable. The Babylon Bee headline, “Pope Francis Announces That God Agrees With Whatever It Is Democrats Want To Do Right Now,” has a disturbing basis in reality.
As of this writing, Pope Francis is hospitalized in critical condition. All Catholics should be praying for his recovery, or that the Lord safely leads him home.
T.R. Clancy is a bad Catholic and looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at [email protected].
Image: Centro Televisivo Vaticano
