(LifeSiteNews) — The clash between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV has reached new proportions with the publication of Dilexi Te, which firmly places the Vatican behind two issues that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has been fighting against for the last decade.
Last month, Trump told the United Nations that immigration was responsible for destroying Europe.
“Your countries are being ruined. It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders,” he exclaimed. “Every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders.”
READ: Pope Leo XIV continues Francis’ emphasis on a ‘poor Church for the poor’ in new exhortation
Trump also declared that climate change was the biggest “con job ever perpetrated on the world,” dismissing it as a “hoax made up by people with evil intentions.” He proceeded to label it, along with illegal immigration, as part of the “double-tailed monster” of the 21st century.
When Pope Francis pushed back against Trump
This sort of messaging is nothing new for the 47th president. Border security is what he is best known by. For his efforts to protect America’s sovereignty during his first term, Trump was excoriated repeatedly by Pope Francis, who once said that someone who only builds walls and not bridges is not a Christian.
Francis used the moral weight of his office to undermine Trump and promote open borders in other ways, too. In his 2016 acceptance speech for the Charlemagne Prize, an award given to those who help bring about European “unification,” Francis said, “I dream of a new European humanism” where “being a migrant is not a crime.”
Francis repeated his “dream” a year later while addressing 27 European heads of state at the Vatican. “As leaders, you are called to blaze the path of a new European humanism made up of ideals and concrete actions,” he said.
In 2014, Francis called on European Parliament to rediscover its memory, its courage, and “a sound and humane utopian vision.”
Pope Leo is continuing the green agenda
Pope Leo has declared his intention to continue Francis’ crusade since emerging from this year’s conclave wearing the white papal vestments.
Leo has repeatedly spoken about the need to protect “our common home” – by this he means the planet, not heaven. He has also spoken about hearing “the cries of the earth” and inaugurated the new eco-village at Castel Gandolfo, which was a pet project of his predecessor that he never saw to fruition. Infamously, Leo blessed a piece of ice at a bizarre climate event earlier this month before meetings with the UN’s immigration czar Amy Pope.
WATCH: Pope Leo blesses block of ice at Vatican ‘climate change’ event
Leo’s first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, continues the legacy of his predecessor. In it, he emphatically declares, “Where the world sees threats, [the Church] sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges.” He adds that the “proclamation of the Gospel is credible only when it is translated into gestures of closeness and welcome. And she knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.”
Leo also cites on several occasions Laudato Si, Francis’ encyclical on the environment. “The deterioration of the environment and of society affects the most vulnerable people on the planet,” Dilexi Te reads.
To further show his continuity with Francis, Leo provides several quotations provided by his climate-concerned predecessor.
Saint John Baptist Scalabrini, a 19th century Italian bishop, “looked forward to a world and a Church without barriers, where no one was a foreigner,” Francis remarked in a 2022 sermon.
The Vatican is giving moral cover for globalists
While the Church does indeed possess an authentic Catholic teaching on the environment and immigration, what Francis and Leo are promoting simply isn’t it. What they are doing is re-packaging their liberal ideological outlook and passing it off as Catholic social teaching.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has drawn attention to this in recent statements. In one social media post, His Excellency said the continuity between Leo and Francis is apparent.
READ: Pope Leo’s scandalous abortion remarks could help Democrats: here’s how
“We know well that the migratory phenomenon is not spontaneous: it is not caused by famine, war, or religious persecution,” he remarked. “Instead, it was desired and planned as a means of destabilizing Western nations, and illegal immigration is used as an instrument of social subversion. This is stated in a United Nations document of March 21, 2000, entitled ‘Replacement Migration.’”
His Excellency continues: “The Holy See is complicit in the subversive plan hatched by the globalist elite…. Finally, abusing the moral authority of the Papacy, the Synodal Church equates immigration, the death penalty, and abortion, to the delight of the woke Left and to the great scandal of pro-life movements.”
He concludes: “This subservience of the Catholic Church to the criminal plan of the Great Reset and Agenda 2030 will be judged by God and by history…”
Wise words from a wise man.
