I was a bit startled yesterday to hear that Pope Francis, the worldwide leader of the Roman Catholic church, had called out Donald Trump, of all people, at the end of a week's trip to Mexico. In response to a question on Trump's faith, the pope said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”
Trump was his characteristic self in reply, expressing surprise and disappointment and challenging the pope's assessment of his Christianity. But it really doesn't matter what Trump said about the pope. It's all about the fact that the pope mentioned Trump in the first place. The Donald did not start this one.
Now, before you ask, I am not a Roman Catholic, or any other flavor of Catholic, not Eastern, Greek or Russian. I am an unaffiliated Southern Baptist, meaning that I am part of a classification -- Protestant -- that has not been represented at all on the Supreme Court since John Paul Stevens retired in 2010.
However, there are no end of Roman Catholics among my friends and family, including 40% of my wedding party, and I have attended innumerable Masses. And I have been a great admirer of some recent popes, particularly John Paul II, whose support of the Polish independence movement, in my mind, helped facilitate the collapse of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe.
I cannot recall in my lifetime, though, a pope making an unforced statement as (1) clearly directed at one individual, and (2) silly on its face.
Donald Trump is definitely not an enemy of the Catholic Church, and certainly not of the Vatican. There was no earthly reason why Pope Francis should have answered the way he did, as if he were forced to take sides between Trump and Mexico, when he had no obligation to.
Let us be clear here. Once you start using the term "building walls" in the way the pope did, you are talking metaphorically as well as physically. Every freaking country on earth, including the Vatican, has borders. Few, if any, have a wall around it as high as the Vatican's own. But they all have borders, except maybe the USA under Barack "come on in and we'll give you welfare as long as you vote Democrat" Obama.
With the exception of the Berlin Wall, those borders are typically built to keep people out, or at least to allow the nation to do the normal, inoffensive governmental task of protecting its citizens by managing the flow of foreigners in and out. I have never in my lifetime heard that referred to as being somehow un-Christian. And Trump's border wall with Mexico, whoever ends up paying for it, is no different conceptually from the "metaphoric border wall" that consists of the cadre of government border patrol keeping watch. Both do the same thing, managing the flow of people in to keep those who should not cross it out.
The other thing that was silly was the part about "... who thinks only about building walls ..." Seriously? How does an Argentine priest, even one who becomes pope, magically develop the knowledge about what an American businessman who is not even Catholic is thinking, all the time? And even if Trump were thinking overwhelmingly about protecting the borders, is the pope unaware of the sworn oath taken by the president of the United States to defend the Constitution and the citizens?
We have a huge army of Muslim thugs already leaking in here and killing innocents -- a far less Christian pursuit. For such as Donald Trump is indeed thinking about walls, it is for the time when he might become president and be obligated to do what is needed to keep his country's citizens safe -- including the Catholics (and, by the way, the Muslims).
Pope Francis could feel free to comment as much as he wanted about the level of faith of, say, Marco Rubio, who actually is Catholic. But he looked like a fool poking his papal nose in a place that he had no business opining on. He looked foolish because there is no way that he can have a sense of the mood in the USA that is helping Trump's candidacy. He looked foolish because saying what he did after a week in Mexico made it look like he had spent a week being brainwashed. He looked foolish because he has not been poking his nose into the political affairs of any other nation, not the UK, not Iran, not China. Believe me, the latter two's leaders offer a lot more to criticize than our candidates.
To the extent that a Protestant may be allowed to comment, his looking foolish has diminished the papacy. And so I ask him, most politely. Please butt out, Your Holiness.
Or pull a Gorbachev and tear down your own wall.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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