Pope Frances clashed with the Trump administration and other governments about mistreatament of immigrants

Pope Frances: A beacon of humanity and kindness

Boston Globe Editorial Board echo:

Pope Frances Jorge Mario  Bergoglio Papacy (2013–2025)​​ Francis was the first Jesuit pope.

Pope Francis held the papacy during a period of global hostility toward immigrants — a trend he did his best to resist.

BBC: Many thousands queue to view the remains of Pope Frances.

By the time he died Monday at 88, Pope Francis was one of the last champions with global stature for the humanity of immigrants. 

In fact, the simple values that the Jesuit from Argentina never forsook — that migrants, like all the world’s vulnerable, should be treated with decency and compassion — have sadly fallen out of fashion in much of the developed world.

Autocrats are on the march across the globe, often demonizing immigrants to acquire power. At such a dark moment, Francis was determined to remain a beacon of humanity and kindness — a role we can only hope his successor will step into as well.

Caring for the poor, immigrants, or the natural world is currently not in style in the United States. Agencies like USAID have been gutted in the name of efficiency; foreign residents like Rümeysa Öztürk have been imprisoned for acts that are clearly protected by the First Amendment; and the National Park Service, like so many other parts of the federal government devoted to protecting the environment, is culling employees.

Also, the administration seems to take a particular (evil!) relish in punishing and humiliating immigrants, posting taunts on social media to boast of its deportations, some of them to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador.

Pope Francis was the antithesis of the Trump administration, not just in his approach to immigration. 

Moreover, Pope Frances famously rejected most of the pomp of his office, passing up the papal palace to live in a modest two-bedroom apartment and traveling in a Ford Focus rather than a Mercedes limo. He was decidedly low-tech, only using landlines and never owning a computer.

Repeatedly, Pope Frances clashed with the Trump administration and with other governments that he viewed as mistreating immigrants. 

In February, in a dismayed letter to US Bishops, Francis wrote, “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.” Trump Border Czar Tom Homan replied, “He ought to focus on his work and leave enforcement to us.”

The legacy of Francis extends much further than US immigration policy, of course, and it is not universally positive. Putting abstract principles into practice consistently is inevitably fraught, especially when Francis’s progressive speech clashed with Catholic tradition.

Francis maintained traditional Catholic stances that view LGBTQ+ people as “intrinsically disordered,” and in March 2024 signed a declaration calling gender-affirming surgery “a grave violation of human dignity.” 

Nevertheless, not insignificantly, Pope Frances offered transgender people the right to be baptized and become godparents, and famously said “Who am I to judge❓” when asked about his stance on gay priests.

He also furthered reforms that enhanced accountability in the church regarding sexual abuse, but his handling of individual accusations — like a case involving Slovenian priest Marko Rupnik, an alleged rapist — have been critiqued as insufficient.

His legacy regarding women is equally complex; he promoted women to positions of power within the Vatican, but failed to alter the rules that ultimately bar them from becoming deacons or priests.

His most lasting contributions to the global dialogue were in his addresses and writings, in which he elevated Catholic teachings about mercy, human dignity, and care for the poor. His record in international affairs was mixed; he was sometimes accused of lacking the clarity of one of his predecessors as pope, Saint John Paul II, and of equivocating about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet there can be little doubt of the sincerity of his beliefs or of the consistency with which he proclaimed them. His was not simply an open-door philosophy: He also supported addressing the root causes of migration from impoverished countries.

Francis’s final audience was with US Vice President JD Vance, a strange coincidence considering that Vance is a staunch supporter of Trump’s hard-line (evil❗) deportation plans.

Francis had chided Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism, for these views in that February letter, and for misrepresenting Catholic beliefs about social responsibility by citing “ordo amoris” — the idea that Christian love is hierarchical, with responsibilities that slowly expand outward — to justify Trump’s America First agenda.

Francis wrote that true Christian love isn’t bound by small circles of interest.

Further, he argued that America’s criminalization of immigrants will lead to an ideology that ultimately “imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”

Immigration has been part of the human experience for millennia. 

In nearly every part of the world, attitudes toward immigrants have swung like a pendulum, from acceptance to resentment and back again. The Catholic Church, at its best, represents values that do not change because they are basic to humanity, like compassion for the vulnerable. It was Pope Francis’s fate to hold the papacy during a period of global retrenchment — a trend that will someday turn because of the work, and the example, of people like him.