I felt the urge to watch 28 Days Later on Tuesday. In case you don’t recognize the title, it’s a 2002 movie about a man – Jim, played by Cillian Murphy – who awakes from a coma to find the world changed utterly. In 28 Days Later, a cataclysmic virus has swept away the world that was when the protagonist fell into his torpor.
What happened on Tuesday to make me think of that (and put me in the mood for apocalyptic popcorn fare)?
Pope Francis issued a 10-point letter to the U.S. bishops in which he directly rebuked U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial policy of mass deportation of undocumented residents.
Francis even included a reference – oblique, but unmistakable and unambiguously critical – to comments made by Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism who has openly defended his administration’s immigration policy on the grounds of his faith.
In a Jan. 29 interview on Fox News, Vance said: “There’s this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
A day later, replying to criticism he had received on X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – Vance wrote: “Just google ordo amoris [Latin for “hierarchy of love” – ed.] Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense.”
In his letter on Tuesday, Pope Francis said, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
The pope said human dignity “surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society.”
“Thus,” Pope Francis said, “all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.”
“The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality,” he said.
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It is hard to think of a previous statement against the workings of a democratically elected leader of a Western nation by a pontiff. It was made just three weeks after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
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Pope Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh pointed out it was very unusual for a Roman pontiff to do this.
“Magisterial in tone and form (numbered paragraphs, quoting papal teachings) and targeted (referring to Trump policies and Vance’s justifications), this letter is meant to leave no doubt about where the Church stands,” he wrote on X. It is impossible to disagree with him.
Much like Jim – the protagonist in 28 Days Later – readers may not immediately realize the change when they wake up.
But they might suddenly notice onetime friends fighting, or unusual alliances being formed, or more dangerously, people not actually being the new friends they seem to be.
This document was issued the same day Francis appointed Bishop Edward Weisenburger as the new archbishop of Detroit. Weisenburger had been bishop of Tucson, in the southern state of Arizona, and a strong advocate for the rights of immigrants. This is just after a month over naming Cardinal Robert McElroy – also a major proponent of immigrant rights – to lead the U.S. capital archdiocese.
For a pope to challenge the President of the United States so openly – and so early after his inauguration – is not merely remarkable. In reality, it is a seismic shift – and it only took 22 days from Trump’s inauguration.
Francis is already being challenged on two levels.
First, significant voices are asking why Trump gets a rebuke while other world leaders get a free pass.
Catholic scholar Samuel Gregg said, “In itself the pope’s statement about America and immigration is unobjectionable,” but added Francis “has a serious consistency problem.”
“For example,” Gregg wrote on X, “[Francis] has said nothing about the persecution of Catholics and other believers in Communist China, and has done a shameful deal with a totalitarian regime that has yielded nothing. Yet there is no letter to the bishops of China talking about the evil they have to confront every single day.”
Gregg also said Francis “regularly soft pedals any criticism of leftist regimes in Latin America and instead talks endlessly about dialogue,” and “did not single out the Biden administration for aggressively pushing abortion and the trans madness on the world,” a reference to Trump’s predecessor in office.
It bears mention that the Catholic bishops of Minnesota last week did criticize both Biden and Trump by name, in a strongly worded letter on the failures of political leadership to address the immigration crisis. “Elected officials in both major political parties have failed to rise above political calculation and collaborate on a solution rooted in respect for migrants and the common good of the nation,” the Minnesota bishops wrote.
“This leadership failure has resulted in repeated conflicts at the border and in our communities that have only grown worse,” they wrote.
The Biden Administration’s migration policies exacerbated these problems,” they continued, “and as a response, President Trump has resolved to instigate measures focused primarily on enforcement and deportations.”
The bishops of Minnesota, however, are not the pope of Rome.
Secondly, many experts – even clergy – just think Francis isn’t correct about the immigration situation in the United States.
“Vance rightly points that immigration, like all public policy issues, carries a mix of benefits and burdens for society. And he also rightly raises the uncomfortable truth that those benefits and burdens are distributed unevenly across society,” Dominican Father Peter Totleben wrote on X.
“Corporations and middle class professionals tend to experience the benefits of immigration, with things like cheap (exploitable!) labor and cheaper access to domestic services that they would not otherwise have–while being pretty much insulated from the burdens of immigration,” the priest wrote.
The first major question – in the here and now – is whether Catholics in the United States will heed the call of Pope Francis, or ignore it in favor of the “other side’s” arguments. In that regard, it is worth noting that Trump garnered significant support from Mass-going Catholics, even Hispanic voters.
At the end of 28 Days Later, most of the central characters are alive and the world looks like it would soon get close enough to normal. Of course, the movie had a sequel, called “28 Weeks Later.”
Get your popcorn ready.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
