(LifeSiteNews) — On this episode of Faith and Reason, John Henry-Westen, Father Charles Murr, and Frank Wright discuss Pope Francis and the U.S. bishops’ recent statements condemning President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, pushback from Catholic members of the administration, the true Catholic teaching on immigration, the successes of Trump’s first week back in office, and more.
The panel began the episode by looking at the Pope and USCCB’s condemnations of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, and the rebuttals from Catholic members of the administration.
They first watched a clip of an interview with border czar Tom Homan, a lifelong Catholic, who blasted the hypocrisy of Pope Francis, who has a wall around the Vatican.
Homan said in the clip:
Well, let me give me a message to the Pope. I’m a lifelong Catholic. I was born a Catholic, I’ve been through Catholic doctrine, but he ought to concentrate on fixing the Catholic Church. First of all, he’s got big problems there. … they have a wall around the Vatican. If you illegally enter the Vatican, the crime is serious. You know you’ll be charged with a serious crime and jailed. So he can protect the Vatican where he lives, he can build a wall where he lives, where [the] American people are not allowed that?
“Notice how he leads there with he is a Catholic and knows the Catholic doctrine on it,” Westen said.
Similarly, Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, slammed the USCCB’s condemnation of Trump’s immigration policies in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Vance noted the funding the bishops receive because of illegal immigration and how open borders are harmful to children who have been sex trafficked.
“As a practicing Catholic, I was actually heartbroken by that statement. And I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said during the interview.
“We’re going to enforce immigration law; we’re going to protect the American people. Donald Trump promised to do that. And I believe the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, that [if] they’re worried about the humanitarian costs of immigration enforcement, let them talk about the children who have been sex trafficked because of the wide-open border of Joe Biden,” Vance added.
Westen asked Murr about the Church’s teaching on immigration and if Trump is evil for his current crackdown.
Murr stressed that it does not contradict Catholic teaching on immigration at all.
“Is Trump evil for what he’s doing right now? Absolutely not. Actually, he’s quite Catholic, though he’s not Catholic. He’s certainly acting within the boundaries of Catholicism, our rules on things like that, yes,” the priest said. “Because every nation, sovereign nation, has a right to defend itself, as every human being has a right to defend himself also. And also we have a right to decide who comes into our country and who does not come into our country. It’s very simple.”
Then Murr highlighted how, as Vance noted in the clip, Church authorities are completely missing the fact that there are currently hundreds of thousands of missing children who have been trafficked.
“Right now, 109,000 children are not just missing, they’re being taken advantage of in all different ways, and not for the good. How does this happen? This happens because they’re not registered, nothing is known about them, they’re lost in the system. They have no defense. Again, they have no defense. The weak have no defense,” he said.
“You have to have people in the system registered in a legal process to becoming citizens or residents of the country so that you can keep track a little bit of what’s happening. This is all underworld stuff, and it’s terrible,” the priest added. “We’re not looking at what this is doing to a lot of people by the hundreds of thousands if not millions, and I mean that literally are being taken advantage of, and they have no rights they can’t complain to anybody.”
Wright stressed that many of the faithful don’t know the Catholic position on mass migration because the modern Church isn’t teaching them anymore.
“Instead, [the Church] is itself transmitting a political platform of what effectively reduces to de-nationalization, which is itself a globalist policy. Now if it had concerned itself with teaching Catholic doctrine, Catholics wouldn’t be in any confusion whatsoever,” Wright said.
“It’s a shame that there is such confusion because this is once again a reminder that Catholic doctrine really does supply the answers to life’s questions. And where it is confused, people fall away from the faith because they think it’s inadequate to answer the questions of modern life. Whereas, in fact, the Catholic doctrine has worked these answers out centuries ago,” he added.
For more discussion on the Catholic teaching on immigration, the Church hierarchy’s clash with the Trump administration over the issue, and much more, tune in to this episode of Faith and Reason.
Faith and Reason is available by video via LSNTV on YouTube, Rumble, Banned, and right here on LifeSiteNews.
It is also available in audio format on Acast. To subscribe to the audio version on various channels, visit LifeSite’s Acast web page here.
We’ve created a special email list for the show so that we can notify you every week when we post a new episode. Sign up now by clicking here.
Learn more
Trump and Colombia’s president clash over deportation flights, raising tariffs in retribution [PBS]
Pope Francis calls Trump’s plans of mass deportation of immigrants ‘a disgrace’ [AP]
Bishops condemn Trump’s immigration orders for stoking fear, anxiety [National Catholic Reporter]
Trump border chief blasts Pope Francis’ hypocrisy on illegal immigration
JD Vance slams USCCB for open borders hypocrisy during CBS interview
There are 2.9 billion reasons why the US bishops loved Biden but hate Trump
Trump reinstates military members kicked out for refusing COVID shots with ‘full back pay’
Trump signs executive order protecting children from chemical and surgical gender mutilation
Trump DOJ ends Biden case against Texas Children’s Hospital gender whistleblower
Trump administration halts cases against pro-lifers, strongly limits future FACE Act use