No matter where you are and why you are there, every baptized person is a full member of the local Church community, a member of the one Church, an inhabitant of a single home, part of one single family,” said Pope Francis in 2021.
Now, though, his message sounds more like an Adidas or Disney board meeting:
“We are racists. We are racists,” the pope said during a special interview on Good Friday, according to The Daily Caller.
Speak for yourself, Francis.
Asked by reporter Lorena Bianchetti if refugees will be “subdivided into the category of being an annoyance” and whether they are met with prejudice, Francis compared today’s economic migrants to wealthier nations to Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, who fled Bethlehem and sought refuge in Egypt.
“It is true. Refugees are subdivided,” Francis said. “There’s first class, second class, skin color, [if] they come from a developed country [or] one that is not developed. We are racists, we are racists. And this is bad. The problem of the refugees is a problem that Jesus suffered too, because he was a migrant and a refugee in Egypt when he was a child, to escape death. How many of them are suffering to escape death!”
The Holy Father went on to tell Bianchetti that Jesus is “in agony” over the wars that have devastated many parts of the world, including Syria, Yemen and Ukraine.
The pope’s “one single family” statement came in a 2021, according to Vatican News.
Ensconced in the opulent safety of the Vatican, Francis has urged the U.S. and other world powers to open their doors for more refugees.
“We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons,” he said in 2015. “Seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation.”
To a certain degree this is unavoidable, and hardwired into our nervous system like aversion to spiders and snakes. (As soon as a baby’s eyes can focus, they demonstrate such aversions.) Heart rate and amygdala / sympathetic nervous system (which drives the “fight or flight” response) activation naturally are increased in the presence of folks with different skin tones. Again, hard-wired and indisputable. Thats not the same thing as racism, though. Its just our natural propensity for cowardice and violence. God is the same way, perhaps- we are made in his image after all, and we know he is Jealous with a capital J! 🙁 I could be wrong. I hope I am, really.
According to America (the RC magazine) there are about 25 million refugees in the world. There happen to be 2.5 Believers on the planet. So if 1 in 100 Believers actually cherished the wisdom of Iēsous rather than weaponizing it to promote our political, economic, and often “ethnic exceptionalist” (if you prefer that to the R word)- and in cherishing notions like giving the cloaks off our own shoulders (eg house / provide job training for 1 refugee)- there wouldn’t be any left. Its not like they won’t give anything back when they are able, or are too dumb to learn our laws. Hitler’s “Public Enemy #1” (Albert Einstein, source: time [dot] com/Einstein-England ) was once a refugee, after all.