03/23/2014
A week ago, I reported on the Speaker of the House inviting the pope to speak before Congress, something that has never happened before and would be quite a blow to the separation of church and state. Pope Francis has not yet accepted as of this writing, but it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t, given the opportunity to spread the Vatican message. Still, there’s no date mentioned, so it’s all rather vague. Maybe Boehner just wanted to see some nice news about himself in the press.
Unsurprisingly, Pope Francis, who hails from Argentina, has shown interest in the illegal alien issue, welcoming intrusive Africans on the Italian island of Lampedusa to Europe as his first foreign trip as pontiff. Amnesty pests see him as a soft touch, and they are likely right.
Right on cue, some anchor aliens and supporters announced a junket to the Vatican to plead their case: “Don’t let meanie Americans deport my dad!”
Wait, aren’t they supposed to be suffering in the shadows? How do they afford a trip to Europe? Picking strawberries must be better paying than we are led to think. Maybe some amnesty billionaire is picking up the tab. Or La Raza.
L.A. archbishop gives blessing to group headed to Vatican, Orange County Register, March 17, 2014
ANAHEIM — The way 10-year-old Jersey Vargas sees it, the pope is the closest person to God.
“I believe he can make a wish for us,” said the petite fourth-grader, the daughter of undocumented immigrants who will be traveling to Rome on Friday to personally deliver a message to Pope Francis from her and other children whose parents face deportation. [ … ]
More than a dozen activists and at least two children whose parents live in the United States without legal documentation will travel to the Vatican to deliver more than 1,000 letters from children whose families live in fear of deportation. They will ask the pope for his blessings “so we can continue with this epic battle,” said Juan José Gutierrez, coordinator of The Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition. And they will also ask the pope to bring up the issue with Obama when the two meet the next day, Gutierrez said.
“It’s very nice for President Barack Obama to tell us quite often that he supports immigration reform. But we believe we’ve gotten to the point where we need more than moral support,” said Gutierrez, whose group is also working to get a private audience with the pope. [ … ]
Huffpo has a slideshow of cloying kiddie letters to the pope, designed to make readers forget that deported dad was the foreign lawbreaker who created his own situation, not the citizens of this country.
La Times focused on one of the Vatican-visiting kids for maximum sob story appeal: “Young advocate seeks pope’s aid on immigration.”
As it happens, the well traveled President Obama has a pope meeting scheduled during his European visit next week. Naturally, they are expected to chat about making life easier for illegal alien job thieves, because nobody important cares about the 20 million jobless Americans.
As the top Vaticrat, the pope would like to promote a more Catholic America, and importing low-information newbies from Latin America must seem like a winning strategy. Years of pedophile priest scandals have diminished church attendance among the disgusted faithful in this country. One in ten Americans is an ex-Catholic, and one-third of Americans raised Catholic no longer identify as such. Obviously replacements of any legality look desirable to Vatican elites concerned primarily with maintaining the institution.
Catholic parishioners, however, prefer laws and sovereignty, shown by a Zogby poll where 64 percent of average Catholics supported enforcement to encourage illegals to go home.
Meeting between Pope Francis and President Obama has promise, carries risk, advisers say, Washington Post, March 20, 2014
Meetings between popes and presidents have often been seen as photo opportunities, but people who have advised President Obama on faith issues say his get-together next week with Pope Francis will involve other high-level officials and likely concrete talks about how to boost the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and ease extreme poverty.
It’s possible, the advisers say, that the U.S. embargo on Cuba and the condition of immigrants in the United States could also arise in the conversation between Obama and the church’s first Latin American pope.
The White House announced in January that Obama would meet Francis during a European trip. Both the President and Michelle Obama will be there, as well as National Security Advisor Susan Rice and possibly Secretary of State John F. Kerry.
While there’s a clear appeal to being seen with the planet’s most popular pastor, experts say the trip isn’t without risks for the president. Francis is likely to raise concerns about war and poverty, areas where the Argentine Jesuit appears to favor more left-leaning solutions than does the current administration.
“Francis is capable of putting some direct leads in front of Obama [about focusing on the poor] and that will require something more than the obligatory response, ‘It’s nice to hear you,’?” said one Democratic strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House wants all information about the trip to run through their communications office. “My guess is the pope would like to see much more explicit work on behalf of the poor. Obama can point to what he’s done. It is certainly not a full alignment.”
Obama has made a point recently of aligning himself with Francis, with the White House saying the two have a “shared commitment to fighting .?.?. growing inequality.” The upcoming meeting will be Francis’s first chance to be more specific with Americans about how he feels their country affects that inequality.
Generally, however, Vatican-watchers saw huge potential in the meeting between the president, who has focused often on poverty, and the pope, who publicly pined upon his election for “a church that is poor and for the poor.”
“Some said that under [Pope John Paul II] and [President Reagan] there was a meeting of the minds, and it’s potentially true again under Obama and Francis around the issues of social justice,” said Miguel Diaz, a Catholic theologian who served as Obama’s ambassador to the Vatican from 2009 until 2012. “This is the first African American president and the first Latin American pope, a man who has chosen the name of Francis [a saint who chose poverty over wealth] and a president who has a history of issues related to social justice like universal health care. I think there are a lot of convergences around these two world figures. .?.?. I think these two men want to meet each other.”
The State Department and the ambassador’s office referred questions about the trip to the White House, where officials said they would not be able to comment in time for this article.
Advisers to the White House on faith-based issues, including the Catholic Church, predict the two may discuss topics such as the current U.S-led Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the pope’s May visit to the Holy Land, the U.S. embargo on Cuba, Syria and the plight of religious minorities around the world.
Some prominent U.S. Catholic conservatives — including bishops — have spoken out strongly against the part of the Obama-created Affordable Care Act that mandates contraception coverage and have characterized Obama as an opponent of the church and of religious freedom. But most Vatican-watchers predicted the pope would not speak directly about the mandate to Obama when the two men meet alone, though it’s possible the topic of domestic religious freedom could come up when other Vatican officials meet with U.S. leaders.
The meeting between the two “should be a warm and personal, pastoral discussion,” said one adviser to the administration on the Catholic Church, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to be seen as speaking on the matter before White House officials.
Some advisers said the trip would be only positive for Obama for several reasons.
First is Francis’s obvious global popularity. Second, appearing with a pope who spoke sharply against the United States even exploring military intervention in Syria and calls “trickle-down theories” unproven might make the president appear more moderate in comparison and help Obama with critics who consider him a radical leftist. It also could shore up his standing with U.S. Catholics, half of whom voted for the president (down from 53 percent in 2008).
Michael Sean Winters, who covers the church for the National Catholic Reporter, said the two men may find connection in having the same opponents.
Francis “knows that there is a conservative narrative that contains the pope and the president in a very negative light. So their criticisms of Obama are taken with a grain of salt,” Winters said.
Others who have advised the White House said there may be discussion of immigration and that the meeting with the Argentine will generally bring attention to the fact that the U.S. Catholic Church is quickly turning Latino. The majority of American Catholics younger than 35 are Latino, and new research by a major Catholic fundraising umbrella group showed Latino Catholics are becoming more involved in institutional U.S. giving (compared with sending money home). U.S. bishops are scheduled to make an unusually prominent visit March 30 to the U.S.-Mexico border and celebrate Mass there, noting in announcing the trip that Francis’s first travel as pope was to the Italian island of Lampedusa to remember African migrants who died crossing into Europe.
“The U.S.-Mexico border is our Lampedusa,” the bishops said in the statement announcing their trip.
House Speaker John A. Boehner has urged Republicans to work with Obama on immigration, and the Ohio Catholic just last week initiated an invitation to Francis to speak to Congress if he comes to the United States next year.
The trip could pump energy into immigration reform, experts on the Vatican and Obama said. “The pope is highly conscious of the fact that millions of Hispanics are here without citizenship and most are Catholic,” said the Democratic strategist who has advised the White House.
“The majority of young Catholics in this country are Latinos, and they will see their president, who they voted for in large numbers, meet their Latin American pope,” Diaz said. “This cannot but be a good day for Latino Catholics.”
One unknown is how the two men will highlight extreme poverty without emphasizing their different views of how to ease it, and how the pope will speak about the United States’ role.
Free markets have created more firmly set winners and losers, a “globalization of indifference .?.?. a culture of prosperity deadens us,” Francis wrote in a major paper in late November arguing that wealth’s purpose must be to help the poor. Similarly, as the United States contemplated military action in Syria, the pope called for a fast and said, “Never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake.”
“Pope Francis is likely to be much less supportive of the U.S. role in the world as a global superpower than were Popes John Paul and Benedict, by virtue of [the two former popes'] backgrounds and experiences,” said Stephen Schneck, head of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at Catholic University and an adviser on Catholics to the 2012 Obama campaign. “And even more so in regards to the use of American military force abroad. I’m not suggesting there is any antipathy, but, given his background, the pope will be more wary about the U.S. role in the world.”
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