- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s brutal treatment of racial minorities, mostly of Hispanic heritage, caused Pope Leo XIV to call upon Catholic leadership to issue a forceful statement condemning such actions.
Obeying the pope, the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops issued their first special message in 12 years at this month’s plenary assembly.
By a nearly unanimous vote, they wrote that they were “saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants,” and “concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.”
The letter also addressed “threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools.”
“We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.”
Following the meeting, the bishops issued a video denouncing the “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence” against those confronted by ICE. More than 1.4 million have watched.
Before their special message, many bishops have stood alongside their Hispanic congregants. In a previous column, I called attention to San Diego Bishop Michael Pham, whose presence at court proceedings caused ICE officials who were waiting to detain the litigants to scatter.
Auxiliary Washington, D.C. bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, a former undocumented migrant from El Salvador, denounces the cruelty shown by ICE agents.
Clergy members from various denominations have come to detention centers only to be turned away or arrested, wrestled to the ground or sprayed with pepper balls.
The Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership is suing the Trump administration for denying Catholic priests and ministers admission to its ICE facilities. The coalition’s executive director said, “For Catholics, pastoral care isn’t optional. We believe that it’s a lifeline.”
The response from Trump loyalists is to declare war on the Catholic Church.
“Boarder czar” Tom Homan condemned the bishops’ letter and the church as “wrong.”
“I’m saying it as not only border czar, I’ll say it as a Catholic. I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic Church, in my opinion.”
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) accused the Catholic Church of using government grants to profit from services rendered to refugees. Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft charged that the bishops squandered more than $2.3 billion dollars received from the government, and praised Trump for terminating them.
Following the bishops’ statement Trump loyalist Lara Loomer posted on X, “Are all of the Jew haters going to be calling out the Catholic bishops and the Marxist American Pope for condemning deportations?”
Matt Walsh, another Trump defender, attacked the bishops, saying they didn’t make a video criticizing the Biden administration “for supporting, funding, and facilitating the mass slaughter of children in the womb,” or “its support for the castration and sexual mutilation of children.”
These responses reflect the usual Trump tactics of name-calling and deflection. Almost immediately after his election, Loomer called Leo a “woke Marxist Pope.” Ben Harnwell, a journalist who promotes what he calls a “gladiator school” for the “Judeo-Christian West,” described Leo as having “[Pope] Francis’s DNA in him.”
Charging that the Catholic Church profits from immigrants is a bald-faced lie. While the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops received approximately $122 million in government grants for refugee-related services, audited financial statements show the bishops spent more money than they received.
Those attacking the bishops and making reference to the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church over the past decades does not diminish the bishops’ call for humane treatment of immigrants and adherence to the Gospel teachings of Jesus Christ.
Trump casts himself as pro-Catholic and calls himself “the most pro-life president ever.” But that does not mean that the maltreatment of those living outside the womb is no less a sin.
As Leo has stated, “Someone who says I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Catholics are swing voters and often determine election outcomes. Joe Biden won their votes in 2020; Donald Trump had a 12-point advantage in 2024. Today, a majority of Catholics disapprove of Trump.
By contrast, a recent survey finds that more than 8 in 10 Catholics view Leo favorably. New York Times columnist David French calls Leo “the most important American in the world,” adding that he “will present a moral witness for years to come, and it’s a moral witness that is fundamentally incompatible with the cruelty and corruption of Trumpism.”
The Catholic Church is more than 2,000 years old. Declaring war on it is hardly civilized or politically smart. Trump has three years left in office. The Catholic Church will survive condemnation by those in power; it’s hardly the first time this has occurred in its long and storied history.
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“I’m saying it as not only border czar, I’ll say it as a Catholic. I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic Church, in my opinion.”
Protestant
As a non-burgerlander, why is it called the “border czar”? that’s such as strange name
so the US executive has unrestrained power, which gives deputies of the president sweeping authorities that have been both positively and negatively likened to that of a ‘czar’ (which is a yankee byword for absolute power despite how they feel about the party that put the czar outta his misery)
it’s one of those rare honest things in media that gets by because it sounds cool and exotic enough that people don’t question why
(which is a yankee byword for absolute power despite how they feel about the party that put the czar outta his misery)
I once heard a Republican attack Obama by saying he had “more czars than the USSR”
the trope is older than the USSR, tsarist russia had a reputation of anti-democracy that made “what are we, asians?” type of discourse in the US get channeled through ‘czarism’;
the bolshevik period required an acute anti-russian line so they just re-used it, there’s warehouses of lib drivel asserting an ‘authoritarian’ (read: czarist) origin to bolshevism, or czarist inclination in the slav brainpan etc.
Technically a correct statement.
In the Burger mind, Russia is a fixed point in the timeline. Catarina, Dostoevsky, Rasputin, Khrushchev, and Putin are contemporaries. If you charged into Russia as a viking raider in the 8th century, you might find yourself coming back out as a merchant carrying printed books and leathers to the Baltics 900 years later.
wow it’s way wilder than i thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._executive_branch_czars
AI and crypto czar
What the fuck
pardon czar
cruise czar
“Czar” is an entirely unofficial title in US politics. It started as media slang to describe whoever the executive has delegated responsible for policy on an issue. eg “Energy Czar” isn’t the head of Department of Energy, but someone in the presidents cabinet. The Energy Czar’s official title would be different from admin to admin.
In shorter terms: its whoever the president’s pointed to and said “this person speaks for me on matters of X issue.”
The Catholic Church is more than 2,000 years old.
It’s canonically like 1994 years old. Almost!
The title of supreme pontiff is like 2400 years old. Checkmate atheists.
Ah yes, Julius Caesar, my favorite pope.
The first supreme pontiff was king in Rome, the current supreme pontiff is a monarch in Rome. Checkmate once again atheists.
the catholic church is exactly 971 years, 4 months and 16 days old, as of the writing of this comment, wtf are you talking about?
The Church claims Jesus founded it while preaching, so around 30 - 33 CE. I was simply taking the oldest plausible date to steelman the article’s claim; to be clear, it’s still false!
boarder czar
AI lookin’ ass article
Hahahahaha oh fuck I’m excited to see where this goes.
DONT TRAD ON MEAmerican Anglican church based around Trump and sectarian violence incoming.
We’ve already had one Anglican splinter this bloody year…
Honestly, it’s kinda funny. Anglicanism technically formally split from Rome over marriage law (though if you believe certain interpretations of Branch Theory and the history of the Catholic Church in the Celtic Isles, the English Reformation was really just a formalization of a divide that had always existed to some degree, but I don’t come on Hexbear to slip back into my 14 year old self and argue niche Anglican church politics, if I want to do that there are better suited websites out there I used back then, so that’s all I’ll say on the matter), and then had a major schism now primarily over… marriage law. And Anglicans in the Celtic Isles… do have a record of sectarian violence. Nasty sectarian violence. Not just against Catholics.
And let’s be honest, American Protestantism has never gotten along with Catholics. Early revolutionary America very much had a problem of “Religious Freedom! Well, unless you’re Catholic.” Cold War Christianity kind of… put all the sectarianism on ice, for an ecumenical alliance against the Godless Commies. But sometimes, the Catholic Left pops out of the woodwork and does some good and I hate my alma mater a little bit less (I went to Catholic school, it sucked, I’m writing a novel turning the Cold War Crusade bullshit I witnessed and suffered through into a comedy), and we are reminded just how much America was, and still is, a deeply Protestant country.
The only thing worse than Catholics running an Inquisition: Protestants on a Crusade.
I’d suggest people start making a fuss about Anglicans being the Church of England and throw around some 1776 rhetoric, but if 1776 rhetoric about American Freedom didn’t work for “Unfinished Revolution” labor movement stuff in the 1910s and 20s, no shot it’ll counter religious sectarian violence a hundred years later. Besides, the involvement of Anglicans would be completely incidental.
This was always going to happen. True 1950s “Cold War Christianity” was never going to last forever. And its decline was always going to destroy the good parts, like the ecumenism and death of American religious sectarian violence, and we’d be insanely lucky to kill the bad too, like the Inquisition style Commie Hunting and the Holy War narrative that places Soviet state secularism as a Rival Theocracy. Before the Cold War, religion as a whole was declining in America, and those Protestants who were still practicing did not like Catholics. By 1955 it didn’t matter what church you went to, as long as you occupied a pew on Sunday morning. It was the Cold War and those Godless Commies were way scarier than the Catholics down the street. At least the Catholics were Christian! Which the Protestants definitely did not believe they were just decades earlier… that was always a shaky alliance. I’m just shocked it lasted a whole 30+ years post Cold War. Maybe the death of the unspoken ecumenical alliance means we can finally start to dissect and unravel the phenomenon of Cold War Christianity. That was always my personal polisci/anthropology hyperfixation. So as a foreign researcher on the subject observing America as a research subject, I love that I get to witness live this period of both Cold War Christianity and American Civil Religion. I might have missed the Cold War itself, but I do get to study its ripple effects live instead! As someone who has to live on Turtle Island while America goes insane, though… my head is going to explode, in a bad way.
I’ve heard of a “grotesque mediocrity [playing] a hero’s part” but this is just ridiculous!
Defenestration of the border czar when?
What would one even call the “Letter of Majesty” but for hot couch guys?
The article is right that the Church will survive the Trump administration but I think they might be overstating the amount of influence the Church has. Trump loving chuds will keep being Trump loving chuds even if Pope Leo specifically says “do NOT support this guy.”
All the Catholic uber-chuds are sedevacantists anyway because not only is it a fun conspiracy (one of their favorite hobbies) but it lets them ignore the woke popes!
sedevacantists
Ooh, that’s interesting, I had to look it up.
SSPX is still in communion though, and there’s definitely a lot of pretty conservative TLM communities throughout the US.
It’s concerning that the conservative Catholic content which is pushed to anyone taking even a minor interest in Catholicism makes SSPX look relatively moderate.
Does it? Do you mean like, crusades/inquisition revisionism, extremely patriarchal stuff (more than SSPX seems hard), violent rhetoric?
I think SSPX probably harbors a lot of the same views, but they’re established enough to at least put on a veneer of being compassionate, especially when compared to the flood of smug and openly hateful zoomers rotating through various podcasts. I don’t know that they actually are much more moderate, but they are less blatant from what I’ve unfortunately come across.
i didn’t know snowboard races was a catholic thing
Also, catholic Americans are so removed from the rest of the church and have so many special dispensations they might as well be an ecumenical church.
South Park did an episode where Jesus shows up and they if I recall correctly the catholic bishop had him locked up for being a jew.
if the pope was cool he would call a cruzade on the anglo-saxon barbarians
brb converting to catholicism so I can partake in the sacking of chicagonstinople
Love to see my enemies fight.
I do not like Catholics, but every now and then, everyone else sucks so much that the Catholic Church genuinely look like the leftmost force involved as someone reads out of the Book of Acts. Or just condemns blatant human rights violations. Which can feel very pot and kettle, but if it works against the Religious Right or at least busies them doing sectarianism instead of immediate harm to people under their thumbs… Never trust the RCC further than you could throw the Pope. But sometimes they make a good temporary ally.
The institution that is the church is always an enemy, and although other enemies can be worse there is never going to be a situation in which the church as an institution genuinely aligns itself with the left without sharpening the blade it will stick in our backs
Catholics however are cool and fine, even people who are formally involved in the church can be pretty cool. There are a handful of pretty cool priests and nuns out there.
Indeed. The RCC as an institution has continually and repeatedly fucked me over. I don’t trust them as far as I could throw an entire cathedral. But individual Catholics can be great people. I’ve dealt with a lot who were. While I think a lot of them are fundamentally flawed in that they are attempting to accomplish good for the world within the very flawed framework of the Catholic Church as an institution, that institution does have a lot of resources and anything that gets them spent on people who need it is worthy of some level of support and admiration for the individuals making it happen. Also, you can’t talk about the historical Western Left without talking about churches as centers of community pre Red Scare that were often also the union hall, and about people like Dorothy Day and groups like the Catholic Workers Movement. And sometimes, for a brief flash, those roots show and some needy people get some help.
I’d smash the RCC and the Vatican in a second given the opportunity. But the individual Catholics? Some of them really do just see a church institution as the only way they can help people who need help or come together and form community, and that’s admirable even if flawed, and nobody’s perfect.
I’m not a practicing Catholic. Never really was. But I went to Catholic school. I grew up around practicing Catholics. I don’t consider that “cultural Catholic” thing to be a problem for me to deal with, so much as a positive or neutral trait. I will never support the institution, but the culture around it, that’s a lot more complicated, and I don’t want to be rid of that. Most of the people are decent. It’s just that the terrible ones are the ones in authority.
Trump loyalist Lara Loomer posted on X, “Are all of the Jew haters going to be calling out the Catholic bishops and the Marxist American Pope for condemning deportations?”
Who is she calling out here? Fuentes? I was baffled by this but it kinda makes sense if she means actual-antisemites and not “antisemites”. But that also doesn’t work because those are the exact people I would expect to complain the most about this?
Maybe she’s just too mad to post coherently?
i think she is just trying to blame the nazi side of maga (Fuentes, etc.) since he is a catholic and call them traitors since their factions have had fights since before the kirk’d
The right do war on everything except poverty, healthcare abuse etc.
Oh no they have a war on poverty, just not the way we want.
They aim to cut the homeless in half by 2028
You mean cut homelessness in half right?
“Yea I’m joining the war on poverty…on the side of poverty.”
Oh, they have a war on “abuse of the healthcare system” alright, just not against privatized healthcare like we’d want, oh no, their war’s against the poor actually using public healthcare they’re entitled to. America dismantles their pitiful Medicaid system, as American style neoliberal-capitalists everywhere else attempt to privatize their public health systems. I’d rant about my local conservative nutters who are doing this, because healthcare gets me spitting mad, but I’d definitely pinpoint my location more than I generally like to in specifically leftist online spaces if I made my usual comparisons between my local conservative politicians and a type of nuisance animal my region has waged a very successful extermination campaign against.
This just in; Pontiff issues call to crusade against the heretical Amerikkkan Civic Religion and it’s adherents. Papal States to ramp up military recruitment and pole arms production as first wave of Swiss Guard commandos parachute into heathen territory and begin hacking crackers to tiny bits with halberds. More at 11!
“Boarder czar”
Border Czar?
boarder czar is about violating the third amendment
Nick Fuentes still says he’s catholic
Tom Holman: nuh uhh!
It’d be the funniest thing in history if the Pope excommunicated him.
MAGA is barking up the wrong tree, young conservatives absolutely love the aesthetics of Catholicism, even if they’re estranged from the formal institution
These dipshit zionist protestent dominionists are making a crucial error that will leave them further isolated, the Fuentes style fash movement doesn’t want to destroy Catholicism, they want to hijack it, and even tho they don’t like the Pope, going after the Pope still signals you’re a RINO in service of the “Globalist Jewish Conspiracy”
AI POPE
AI POPE
AI POPE
