Pope Slimes Trump, Agitates for Open Borders

Pope Francis injected himself into the 2016 election yesterday by blasting Republican frontrunner Donald Trump as "not Christian" for promising to build a wall along the southern border to keep illegal aliens out of the United States. These inflammatory comments from a pampered absolute monarch who lives in a walled fortress protected by armed Swiss Guards came after his anti-American publicity stunt at the U.S.-Mexico border careened out of control -- and they were soon answered by Trump.

They also came days after Trump criticized the pope for planning to visit the border to promote lawlessness. The presidential candidate said Francis didn't understand "the danger of the open border we have with Mexico." He added, "I think Mexico got him to [visit the border] because Mexico wants to keep the border just the way it is because they’re making a fortune and we’re losing." Although Vatican City, recognized as a sovereign nation, has very strict immigration controls, Francis spent Wednesday afternoon blasting U.S. immigration policy and condemning capitalism during a mass strategically located near the fence that separates Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from El Paso, Texas. He previously hoped to make an even bigger spectacle of himself by walking in solidarity with other aliens across the border, but U.S. officials nixed that plan. At the service Francis honored "migrants who have perished trying to reach the United States just a stone's throw away." The pope also blessed crosses beside "shoes of migrants who died," adding "No more death! No more exploitation!" Sounding like a Marxist community organizer, Francis blamed U.S. immigration policies for causing a "humanitarian crisis" and declared that "the flow of capital cannot decide the flow of people." The pope erected a cross in memory of border crossers who have died invading the United States.

---

Francis is preoccupied with radical left-wing ideology, not empirical facts

He said these people took:

"A step, a path filled with terrible injustice, enslavement, kidnappings, extortion. Many of our brothers are the fruits of the business of human trafficking. We cannot deny a humanitarian crisis, which in recent years has seen the migration of millions of people."

Columnist Ben Shapiro was having none of it:

"The reason for the humanitarian crisis driving people north is the corrupt anti-capitalist governance so common to Latin America – the same sort of governance the pope believes is apparently more godly than the capitalism drawing people like a magnet to the United States. So the same system the pope decries is the system the pope wants inundated with victims of those who oppose that system. How ironic."

Francis, a Jesuit from Argentina, has thrown his lot in with anarchists, anti-nationalists, neo-communists, and the radical libertarians of the open-borders movement who cry that the existence of borders in themselves is fundamentally unjust. Christians and communists are the same, Francis has also said. Communists are closeted Christians who "have stolen our flag." This pope has even formed political alliances with the community organizers of the activist Left in the U.S., Obama administration officials, and radical activists like Naomi Klein, a college dropout and Red diaper baby whose mother made documentaries about Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky. Francis is preoccupied with radical left-wing ideology, not empirical facts. Anyone with eyes knows that the proliferation of capitalism over the past two decades has lifted a billion people out of dire poverty -- and in coming decades is projected to rescue another billion from pauperism -- but Francis robotically slams global capitalism, or "globalization" as the Left calls it, foolishly blaming markets for poverty. Markets, not handouts, accomplish humanitarian feats that the Bishop of Rome's church could never, ever hope to match. Francis embraces liberation theology, which Shapiro calls "essentially a mashup of Christianity and Marxist redistributionism -- a theology in which capitalists must be blamed for the world's ills and then forced to absorb all of its problems." Shapiro writes:

"All of this would appall Pope John Paul II, who said, 'This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth does not tally with the church’s catechism.' Pope Benedict XVI said liberation theology was a 'singular heresy' and 'fundamental threat' to the Catholic Church."

On the flight back to Rome after the five-city visit to Mexico, a reporter asked a question that allowed the papal mudslinging to begin. Trump described Francis as "a political man" and "a pawn, an instrument of the Mexican government for migration politics," the Reuters scribe said. Trump, he noted, has promised to construct 2,500 kilometers of wall along America's southern border and deport 11 million illegal aliens. "Thank God he said I was a politician because Aristotle defined the human person as 'animal politicus,'" His Holiness quipped.

"At least I am a human person. As to whether I am a pawn, well, maybe, I don't know. I'll leave that up to your judgment and that of the people. And then, a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel. ... I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that."

Trump fired back. "If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS's ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened," the real estate mogul said. "For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful," he added. This kind of conflict between the church and American politicians was inevitable.

Saul Alinsky, who infiltrated many Catholic parishes in his day, would definitely approve of Pope Francis

Like plenty of Protestant denominations, the Catholic church in the U.S. has been overrun by radical left-wingers. The ACORN-loving Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the charitable arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), is politically extreme and anti-American to its core. CCHD is aggressively pro-open borders and American Catholic bishops have conducted plenty of their own publicity stunts at the U.S.-Mexico border urging the United States to let in anybody who wants to come to America. Long mocked as the "Catholic Campaign to Help Democrats," the charity funds the Industrial Areas Foundation, which was founded by Saul Alinsky, and other dangerous Alinsky-inspired groups including the Gamaliel Foundation and Direct Action and Research Training Institute (DART). CCHD has funded voter drives benefitting politicians who support un-Catholic causes such as abortion-on-demand. In his career as a community organizer, Barack Obama worked on at least one project underwritten by CCHD. The current pope's radicalism, which some Roman Catholics say merely constitutes adherence to the church's so-called social justice teachings, is nothing new in the world of Catholicism. Alinsky, who infiltrated many Catholic parishes in his day, would definitely approve of Pope Francis.