Pope Francis is rattling the Trump administration this week with a letter to the U.S. bishops regarding the president’s mass deportation policies. Calling them a “violation of the dignity of many men and women and entire families,” the letter upset President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who, when asked by a reporter about the pope’s “harsh words,” bleated out, “I got harsh words for the pope. The pope ought to fix the Catholic Church.”
Really?
Homan should know better than to critique the pope over clear Catholic teaching.
As a Catholic, Homan should know better than to critique the pope over clear Catholic teaching. So should Vice President JD Vance, a relatively recent Catholic convert who got a pointed correction to his faulty Catholic theology in Francis’ letter. Homan, a cradle Catholic, and Vance, a convert, each needs to go back and take some remedial Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) courses to understand the teachings of the Catholic Church on human dignity. After all, as Francis reminds Vance in his letter, Jesus was an immigrant.
The Trump administration, which describes itself as “faith based,” is in fact setting itself up for an epic religious and social battle with religious groups over deportation. Francis’ letter is notable because he took the time to write specifically to the bishops of the United States about the way deportations have been categorized by the Trump administration. The letter is clear about this, stating, “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.”
In other words, labeling all deportees as criminals flies in the face of human dignity, and is directly opposite to Christian teachings about loving and caring for one’s neighbors.
Vance proclaimed himself to be “heartbroken” about the Catholic bishops’ criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, and, in a tone similar to Homan’s, said the bishops needed to “look in the mirror” because “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?”
Francis’ letter was also a pointed critique of Vance’s erroneous exposition on medieval theology. “Just google ‘ordo amoris,’” Vance posted on the social media platform X on Jan. 30 as people were criticizing him for a Fox News interview in which he said, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He said the “far left” got the order backward.
Francis’ letter was also a pointed critique of Vice President JD Vance’s erroneous exposition on medieval theology.
And in the X post, he called his view “basic common sense.”
To the contrary, the ordo amoris is about the order of love and charity that should be held for all humans, and to care for all in need. To quote from the pope’s letter, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”
The pope devoting a whole paragraph to correcting Vance should be seen as embarrassing, not only for the vice president but also for the Trump administration as a whole.
Vance used the old Catholic theology to defend the Trump administration's immigration policy. Pope Francis made clear that's not the church's interpretation. In the battle between the Catholic Church and the Trump administration over deportations, Francis has been putting his chess pieces on the board. He just appointed another pro-migrant bishop, Bishop Weisenburger, to serve as archbishop in Detroit. And as I’ve previously written, Cardinal Robert McElroy, whom the pope decided to make the archbishop of Washington, D.C., after Trump won, has decried mass deportations. Given those voices and a statement defending migrants from Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, the Trump administration should expect there to be more than the usual criticism of its decidedly non-Christian policies on immigration and deportation. Even New York’s archbishop, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who led a prayer at Trump’s inauguration last month, said Vance’s comments on the bishops and immigration were “very scurrilous and very nasty.” Other religious groups are joining in to denounce Trump’s draconian deportation policies. A lawsuit filed by 27 religious groups is suing the Trump administration to protect houses of worship from immigration raids. Add to that the condemnation over the closure of U.S. Agency for International Development offices around the world, which many U.S. religious organizations participated in, and you have the makings of a new war pitting religious groups against Trump’s immigration and foreign aid policies. Even Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who led a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, said Vance’s comments were ‘very scurrilous and very nasty.’ Francis clearly wants this fight. He called Trump’s focus on deportations a major crisis in his letter to the bishops. Then he directly addressed the Trump administration in his letter by saying “what is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” I think members of the Trump administration believed they could brush aside the concerns of Christians with MAGA-style rhetoric and bad theological takes and did not anticipate an immediate fight — and certainly not a scolding letter from the pope. Unlike the sycophantic evangelical followers and prosperity gospel folks like Paula White, the new head of Trump’s faith office, the administration is now encountering Christians who understand and seek to carry out the message of the Gospels.
Anthea Butler is a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
