The Pope Joins ‘Gang of Eight’?

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When I saw this Tweet by the Pope, I was like, “Did George Soros pay him to say that?” The House is now considering the Comprehensive Piece of Crap Bill, and I was pretty pissed about it. Had the Senate Republicans or the Ford Foundation or some other open-borders lobby group gotten the Pope involved in pushing this legislative atrocity?

Apparently not.

Did you know that thousands of Africans have died trying to reach Italy? The European Union’s disastrous immigration policies — apparently, once you set foot there, they can’t kick you out — have made the Italian island of Lampedusa a mooch-magnet:

Pope Francis has visited Lampedusa to pay tribute to the thousands of refugees who have lost their lives trying to reach the European Union. The pope also criticized what he called the “globalization of indifference.”
The head of the Roman Catholic Church, who arrived on the tiny southern Italian island on Monday morning, tossed a wreath into the sea from an Italian coast guard vessel to commemorate the deceased would-be migrants. . . .
Later, the pontiff celebrated a mass on the island . . . in which he slammed what he described as “the globalization of indifference” and “the culture of wealth,” that causes people to become insensitive to the plights of others.
“We pray for a heart which will embrace immigrants,” he said via his Twitter account following the mass. “God will judge us upon how we have treated the most needy.”
Lampedusa, which is closer to Africa than the Italian mainland, has been the point of entry to the European Union for more than 200,000 people since 1999. More than 17,000 would-be migrants have died trying to reach the island during the same time period.
Around 4,000 have reached Lampedusa in the first half of this year alone, but this is well below the tens of thousands who reached the island during the Arab Spring revolts of 2011.

The “globalization of indifference”? Hey, dig this, Pope: How about encouraging the localization of responsibility?

If everybody is responsible, nobody is responsible. If it’s Europe’s job to take care of Africans, what is Africa’s job other than building boats so they can try to get to Europe? How about encouraging Africans to do something more productive than trying to leave Africa?

Also, speaking of “how we have treated the most needy,” Pope, I checked my records and you’ve never hit my tip jar. Just sayin’ . . .





 

UPDATE: Catholic readers might be shocked by my disrespectful tone toward His Holiness, but remember, I’m Protestant, so I can backtalk that guy and still get to Heaven. And why should this kind of gooey “social justice” nonsense — which intelligent people would reject as the idiocy it is, if Lindsey Graham said it –be exempt from criticism just because it’s coming from a dude wearing a robe?

C’mon: Was Rerum Novarum divinely inspired? Or was it, as I insist, a failed attempt by a fallible human being — a cleric with no training in economics — to strike a middle ground between the 19th-century radical Left and the reactionary Right? And upon the economic errors of Rerum Novarum, Catholics have erected an edifice of “social justice” doctrine that, a few decades ago, gave rise to the heresy of “liberation theology” that the Pope himself had to rebuke.

The duty of Christian charity cannot be transferred to governments, because that not only relieves the individual of his own obligation to charity, but it also encourages an attitude of helpless dependency and entitlement among the poor. “Social justice” thereby becomes a sort of adhesive that glues the poor to the economic floor, where sloth and profligacy are rewarded by government handouts and the lazy are encouraged toward envy of the industrious and thrifty.

Having turned Europe into a gigantic Social Welfare State, these economic errors have now made Europe a magnet for Muslim “refugees” who claim the right to emigrate on the basis of . . . what? Because they were born in Africa? Really? Just any person born in Africa can go to Europe and claim to be a “refugee,” because they’re African? There are 1 billion people in Africa, and I certainly hope His Holiness doesn’t mean they all have the right to move to Europe, whose citizens must have “a heart which will embrace immigrants” or else be condemned to Hell.

Speaking of being condemned to Hell, if you haven’t hit my tip jar lately, your immortal soul could be in jeopardy.

The Pope’s got his “social justice” doctrine, and I’ve got mine.





 

UPDATE II: A miracle! Like loaves and fishes!

“Go thou and do likewise.” Amen.

 


97 comments

  1. It’s probably not unreasonable for the Pope to come out against drowning women and children on his own doorstep. Would be nice if, for example, Australia’s prog Labor Party felt the same.

  3. What ever happened to liberals lecturing us about the “root cause” of problems, huh? I mean, what is the “root cause” of this immigration situation? Could it be the proliferation of socialist nonsense?

    I think so, and the government should give me a research grant to study this problem.

  5. Hey RSM, I like your sentiment but I think that there is a much better way to put it that wouldn’t set Catholics teeth on edge.

    It is a failure of faith to imagine that God could not gift Africa or Latin America or even the Middle East with competent government. We should not imagine God so impotent.

    Plan A should be that every government of the world be competent enough to meet the basic needs of its people and cut off these tragic human waves of migrants at the source. At that point, welcoming the immigrant becomes a lot easier, and a lot less dangerous because absent rare and major natural disasters, people tend to stick around in their own countries where they are not put under the stress of migration unless they are one of those relatively rare souls who are constitutionally suited for a different society.

  6. I’m Catholic. I cantor in my church every week. I go to church because of our mass, not because of any priest or anyone else. I’ve come to realize, since the commie was elected, that our church is made up of a bunch of socialists. I’m still not over Notre Dame inviting him to speak at their commencement. I don’t take anything too seriously that anyone says in the church anymore. Didn’t the bishops want Obamacare? Well, now they have it.

  7. The Catholic Church is both pro-migrant and pro-responsibility. It is a distortion of Jesus’ teachings to emphasize one over the other, something that the media do to Popes on a regular basis. If Africa were governed competently, cross Mediterranean migration flows would be small enough that handling them would not be a daunting task. They would also be bi-directional (see the portuguese return to Angola as an example of how it should be working).

  8. The socialist conception of Catholicism is not true to the faith. It is a heresy. I’ve been working on this problem as a side project for years.

    Catholicism is orthogonal to US conventional political categories. Witness against the socialist heresy (previous popes have written plenty on the subject so it’s not like you’re without ammunition) just like any other heresy.

  12. As a side note of a much larger process that eliminates the threat of cultural swamping and economic abuse of our own domestic poor, I could see doing something along the lines of what we do for properties (adverse possession). 20 years and not even a speeding ticket or a day on welfare and you get to the back of the line for citizenship, see ya in another 10 for your swearing in.

    edit: The major point is that regularization is not horrible if the numbers are small enough. The stuff I’m talking about should cut down on illegals by better than 90%. That’s likely better results than we’d get with a fence and it wouldn’t be a betrayal of Jesus, but rather a truer implementation of his teachings.

    The bottom line is a workable Plan A is competent governance in Latin America and Africa, and progress is being made on both fronts. Mass migration is what happens when plan A fails.

  14. Lampedusa is a small island closer to North Africa than Sicily that is Italian territory (and is part of Sicily). It used to be known for nice beaches and a place to go in August. Now it is known for refugees.

    Sicily is a fascinating place. It at one time had pygmy elephants until the original people who went there (who at least from the elephants’ perspective were illegal immigrants) ate them all. Their skulls were the basis of the myths of Cyclops living on the island. Many of the scenes of Homer’s Odyssey are set in Sicily (and I suppose Odyesseus was an illegal immigrant too).

    Then the Greeks came (they could have been considered illegal immigrants at the time) and started colonies up and down the Ionian Coast. The civil war that erupted between the Greek city states was mostly fought in Sicily and resulted in the defeat of Athens and the Athenian Greek Golden Age coming to a close.

    The brilliant mind Archimedes (who may have invented calculus more than a thousand years before it was “invented” by Descartes and Newton) was a Greek Sicilian in Syracusa. But he was killed by some Roman Legions (who could have been considered illegal immigrants at the time).

    And then came the Muslim hordes out of North Africa (no not now, back in the day). They were illegal immigrants. Sicily was then part of the Islamic Caliphate It stayed that way for hundreds of years until some Normans offered to take it back and got the blessing of the Pope (in exchange for running the place afterwards). And those wily Normans did so (even though from the Muslim perspective they were illegal immigrants) and managed to turn Sicily back to a Christian land. Yea Pope, yea Normans!

  15. In my corner of the Catholic Church (Romanian Byzantine Catholic) we still regularly pray for our martyred bishops who, to a man, refused to cooperate with the communists (thus the martyrdom). It makes for an interesting overlay on generic Catholicism and is real world proof that, at best, your description is over-broad.

    But unfortunately, I wouldn’t even say that it’s overbroad, but rather wrongheaded. The Church is not for saints, but for sinners.

    Socialism ultimately is incompatible with Catholicism, as I said, a heresy. You convert the heretic. You don’t just kick him out of your clubhouse. Socialists and communists are already too much in their sealed off little worlds.

    When the guy next to them, who they know and respect because of his obvious commitment to their shared faith talks about the heresy of socialism, ultimately they can’t ignore it because they see that guy every Sunday.

    It’s an intimate knife fight style. I’d think you’d like that, or at least respect the art form.

  16. “The duty of Christian charity cannot be transferred to governments, because that not only relieves the individual of his own obligation to charity, but it also encourages an attitude of helpless dependency and entitlement among the poor. “Social justice” thereby becomes a sort of adhesive that glues the poor to the economic floor, where sloth and profligacy are rewarded by government handouts and the lazy are encouraged toward envy of the industrious and thrifty.”

    That hits the nail on the head. And if someone works for the government, that’s exactly what they want. It has nothing to do with wanting to do good, but what they can get out of it for themselves.

  18. “A miracle like the loaves and fishes…an Instalanche!”
    Calm down there Elmer…

  20. For some of us, it’s damn close to one.

    BTW, Stacy, I got RT’d by Insty on a post of mine that I had Tweeted about. I gather that’s not officially an Instalanche, so what is it??? Intoxicated minds want to know.

  22. That also means Europe and the U.S. needs to take responsibility for policies that push migrants into the U.S., like subsidizing agriculture for instance and pushing those goods in the majority world. Glad to hear you’re open to a process for citizenship. 20 years seems a little bit long, I’d push it back to 10, at least, with another 10 for citizenship. Glad to see a fellow pro-migrant Catholic, though, even if we probably come from very different political viewpoints.

  23. Ya wanna be picky about root causes, then a lot of Yurpeens waving bibles and muskets screwing with the development of these cultures. In some cases, like China and Japan, it came back to bite us in the ass. In others around the world the local ass remained bit. So Rome and CoE should probably share a little embarrassment in the latter case.

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