Pope Francis Vs. The Donald: The Radical Meaning Of The Pope’s Visit to Juárez

By looking across the Rio Grande, from south to north, Pope Francis was asking Americans to consider the immigration crisis from a new perspective.

CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY GREGORY BULL / AP

"Pope Francis Links"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/11/pope-francis-links.html

Pope Francis: Quotations On Finance, Economics, Capitalism And Inequality

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/pope-francis-on-finance-economics.html

Pope Francis: One Of The Most Powerful Critiques Of Capitalism You Will Ever Read

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/03/pope-francis-one-of-most-powerful.html

Pope Francis: "This Economy Kills"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/01/pope-francis-this-economy-kills.html

Catholic Social Teaching

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/01/catholic-social-teaching.html

Pope Francis: Moving The Moral Compass 
From "The Individual" Toward "The Collective"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/01/pope-francis-moving-moral-judgment-from.html

The Radical Meaning of Pope Francis’s Visit to Juárez

BY JAMES CARROLL

Across Mexico this week, Pope Francis spoke tenderly to masses of ordinary people and delivered blistering messages—“God will hold accountable the enslavers of our day”—to drug lords, corrupt government officials, oligarchs, and even bishops. But in Juárez on Wednesday, at the U.S.-Mexico border, he offered perhaps his most powerful statement with a simple blessing and the act of standing still. On a platform overlooking the Rio Grande, in blazing sunlight, beside crosses memorializing migrants who had died making the trek north, Francis faced the skyline of El Paso, Texas—an unreachable city for many of the thousands of Mexicans who came to see him. Unlike everything else that Francis did and said during his trip, this act was expressly addressed to the people of the United States. By looking across the river from south to north, by aligning his gaze with that of the Mexican public, Francis was asking this country to think about its migrant crisis from a different point of view.

The Pope leads not by mandate but by invitation. “Let us together ask God for the gift of conversion,” he prayed at the border Mass. By “conversion,” Francis meant a change in attitude. This was a particular instance of his broad emphasis on the urgency of considering questions of the economy, climate, health, and culture from the perspective of the impoverished global majority. It is an idea that has proved unpopular with some of our current and aspiring political leaders. Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio have all, at various times, defended themselves from the implications of papal criticism by decrying this religious figure’s trespass into the political realm. Trump, when asked about the Pope’s intention to stand at the border, denigrated him as “a very political person” and a tool of the Mexican government. (On Thursday, Francisaddressed Trump’s comments directly while on his way back to the Vatican. “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian,” he said. “As to whether I am a pawn, well, maybe. I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to your judgment and that of the people.”) Defenders of the Pope, meanwhile, insist that, on the issue of poverty, he is properly political. But something crucial is being lost in the back-and-forth argument about the distinction between religion and politics, which is only a variant of old American quarrels about church and state.

The Pope’s standing shoulder to shoulder with a beleaguered people recapitulates the very foundation of the Biblical faith, which began, after all, in a migrant crisis like ours. In Exodus 3:7-8, God says, “I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them.” The Hebrews, understood by Pharaoh as the cause of plagues that threatened to destroy his nation, were driven out into the wilderness, where they wandered for forty years. The Hebrews of old, that is, were the first displaced persons.

The Bible tells a story of power, violence, and conquest, but—and this sets the Bible apart—it tells that story from the point of view of the victims of power, not the possessors of power. When plagues strike a country—disease, economic collapse, political anarchy, blood in the water—the country, for the purposes of social order, typically heaps its distress onto a marginal, despised minority. They become a scapegoat (a word that refers to the sacrificial goat that the Israelites, in Leviticus 16, send away in an act of atonement). Once that victim is expelled, the nation can seem to heal—which is, of course, the fantasy that Trump has, with his plan to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants. The scapegoat story is usually told by those doing the scapegoating. But the Bible, beginning with the Exodus exile, flips that narrative to affirm that God stands with those who have been cast out.

God’s solidarity with the disenfranchised is not just a function of his omnidirectional love. No, love is the concern of those at the top of the social order. Those at the bottom want not love but justice—and the Bible offers it by seeing everything from below, from south to north. Thus, when people are scapegoated and driven out, God goes with them. This is the radical vision that so-called religion has, across the millennia, sought to domesticate, or even delete. Religion has continually realigned God with the powerful, and that is the religion invoked against Francis by Trump and the others.

In the United States—decisively including the Obama Administration, which has been so ruthless about deportations—Latino migrants are the paradigmatic scapegoat of the moment. (In Europe, the scapegoated people are Muslims, and Francis has stood with them, too.) His presence at the border in Juárez may have special resonance because he is the first Latin American Pope, but his stance transcends personal identity, just as it transcends politics and religion. He is offering neither an explicit critique of U.S. immigration policy nor a solution to the many dilemmas that bedevil its reform. He is simply suggesting that there is another point of view that must be reckoned with. Standing at the Rio Grande with Mexicans, Pope Francis was only being Biblical.