Pope Francis on Sunday said it would be a “disgrace” for incoming US president Donald Trump to make good on promises to expel undocumented immigrants.
“We have not spoken [of this],” Francis told Italian tv host Fabio Fazio during a conversation on Fazio’s Che Tempo Che Fa program on Sunday, “but if it is true, it will be a disgrace, because he will make these poor unfortunates, who have nothing, pay the bill of disorder [It. squilibrio].”
“This won’t do,” Francis said, “this is not the way to resolve the matter.”
Speaking to NBC News this weekend, mere days ahead of his inauguration, Trump said his administration will begin mass deportations “very early” in his new term, but did not say where or precisely when they would begin.
“It’ll begin very early, very quickly,” Trump said. “I can’t say which cities,” Trump also said, “because things are evolving, and I don’t think we want to say what city.”
“You’ll see it first-hand,” Trump said.
Trump also told NBC News he would sign a “record-setting” number of Executive Orders on his first day in office but was short on specifics regarding their scope.
Pope Francis recalled his May 2017 meeting with Trump, a few months after Trump began his first term in the White House.
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“He came here once, when he was president the last time,” Francis said.
That 2017 meeting came fifteen months after Francis had harsh words for then-candidate Trump regarding his plans for a border wall, which was a major 2016 presidential campaign issue.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said in 2016, in response to a journalist’s question during an in-flight press conference en route to Rome after a papal trip to Cuba and Mexico.
The pope’s remarks in 2016 set off an exchange.
“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” Trump said in a statement. “I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President,” who was Barack Obama at the time.
After their first tête-à-tête in 2017, however, Trump said, “We had a fantastic meeting.” Of Pope Francis, Trump said, “He’s something.”
“[I]t was an honor to be with the pope,” Trump also said.
Trump and Francis are not likely to decrease the daylight between them on immigration, but they have both expressed support for “dialogue” to end the war of Russian aggression that has been raging for nearly three years in Ukraine, a position many observers across the spectrum of opinion believe favorable to Russia in effect if not intent.
Whether Pope Francis and President Trump will find a way to work together on Ukraine or any other issues on which their views possibly converge, remains very much to be seen.
