No, the pope is not “bossing around” the U.S. on border wall.

olit­i­cal agi­ta­tor Ann Coul­ter took to Twit­ter a few days ago to share these ster­ling thoughts. The typog­ra­phy is hers:

 

Jeb!, an AMERICAN Catholic, defends Trump, dis­ap­proves of Pope boss­ing around U.S. on wall. Rubio, a ROMAN Catholic, behold­en to the Pope.

At the time I write this, that post has received 1,143 favorites and 656 retweets. (In anoth­er mis­sive on Twit­ter, she con­trast­ed Trump’s blame­less busi­ness deal­ings with the Church’s tol­er­a­tion of pedophil­ia. Even though the pope had some very harsh words to say about such priests in the very same inter­view. But I digress.) Coul­ter was not at all alone; on his radio show (tran­script and audio here), Sean Han­ni­ty (who is Catholic) accused the pope of “insert[ing] him­self into this elec­tion.” Even the New York Times, not known for its con­ser­v­a­tive lean­ings, pro­claimed that the pope was “insert­ing him­self into the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial race.”

Real­ly? Does no one—no one—know how to check a tran­script any­more? To sug­gest the pope is insert­ing him­self and boss­ing the U.S., if he is not in fact doing that, is bear­ing false wit­ness. Is it not?

So once more this is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to show how far the pope’s actu­al words are from what the media is report­ing them to be. Let us go to the offi­cial tran­script pro­vid­ed by Catholic News Agency and look at the exchange. It starts with a ques­tion by Phil Pul­lel­la of Reuters:

Today, you spoke very elo­quent­ly about the prob­lems of immi­gra­tion. On the oth­er side of the bor­der, there is a very tough elec­toral bat­tle.

Ah, so it is the reporter who brings up the Amer­i­can elec­tion. So what­ev­er the pope says, it is in response to the reporter hav­ing intro­duced the top­ic.

And by the way, do you think the pope is fol­low­ing the pri­maries and gets reports about all the scut­tle­butt and vis­its the blogs every day to keep track of the twists and turns like a soap opera? I don’t know, but some­how I doubt this occu­pies quite so much of the pope’s time and thought as it does ours. The rea­son I point this out is because it is very like­ly that the only infor­ma­tion the pope has to go on is what the guy from Reuters gives him as con­text for the ques­tion.

Pul­lel­la went on:

One of the can­di­dates for the White House, Repub­li­can Don­ald Trump, in an inter­view recent­ly said that you are a polit­i­cal man and he even said that you are a pawn, an instru­ment of the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment for migra­tion pol­i­tics.

This may be a shock for some peo­ple to hear, but I do not think Pope Fran­cis, pri­or to this ques­tion, had any idea at all who Don­ald Trump is. I real­ly don’t. Here is a man who has giv­en his life to ser­vice of the poor; he is not keep­ing track of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. And so his first intro­duc­tion to the name Don­ald Trump is in the con­text of bait from a reporter who is try­ing to gen­er­ate a head­line: Hey, Frank, there’s this guy Trump who has said not nice things about you. What do you have to say about that, huh?

Pul­lel­la went on:

“Trump said that if he’s elect­ed, he wants to build 2,500 kilo­me­ters of wall along the bor­der. He wants to deport 11 mil­lion ille­gal immi­grants, sep­a­rat­ing fam­i­lies, etcetera.

Talk about lead­ing the wit­ness on a pol­i­cy pro­pos­al he like­ly has heard noth­ing about, not to men­tion read!

I would like to ask you, what do you think of these accu­sa­tions against you and if a North Amer­i­can Catholic can vote for a per­son like this?

Again, note that it is the reporter who invites Pope Fran­cis to com­ment upon the elec­tion, tries to cor­ner him into telling Amer­i­can Catholics how to vote, and tries to start a war of words between a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and the pope. It is not as though the pope address­es these top­ics on his own ini­tia­tive, as though he were hand­ing out a motu pro­prio about who to vote for. The pope does not wake up and say to him­self, Let me inter­fere in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics today, insult Don­ald Trump, and dri­ve Coul­ter and Han­ni­ty wild, because, you know, those two clowns real­ly have it com­ing. Lim­baugh too. I’ve always hat­ed Lim­baugh.

Here is how the pope answers:

Thank God he said I was a politi­cian because Aris­to­tle defined the human per­son as ‘ani­mal politi­cus.’ At least I am a human per­son. 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.

Hmm. Okay, so the pope is self-effac­ing. He turns Trump’s words into an oppor­tu­ni­ty to joke about Aris­to­tle, and does not show the least impulse toward defen­sive­ness or self-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. He says: I will let peo­ple make their own judg­ments.

Here is the rest of the pope’s answer:

And then, a per­son who thinks only about build­ing walls, wher­ev­er they may be, and not build­ing bridges, is not Chris­t­ian. This is not in the Gospel. As far as what you said about whether I would advise to vote or not to vote, I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Chris­t­ian if he has said things like that. We must see if he said things in that way and in this I give the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

A cou­ple things are going on here, so let’s take them one at a time.

First, right in the mid­dle of all that, the pope specif­i­cal­ly refus­es to “insert him­self” into the elec­tion. “I am not going to get involved in that,” he says. He is not going to tell peo­ple how to vote. That means that the claims of Sean Han­ni­ty and the New York Times are just flat-out false.

Sec­ond, the pope’s first state­ment (1) is phrased gener­i­cal­ly. He does not address Trump specif­i­cal­ly here, but just “a per­son.” He is mak­ing a gen­er­al obser­va­tion. And (2) it con­tains an impor­tant, qual­i­fy­ing adverb. “A per­son who thinks only about build­ing walls … is not Chris­t­ian,” the pope says. He does not say a bor­der wall is bad of itself. Nor does he address the com­plex­i­ties of nation­al secu­ri­ty con­cerns. Instead he crit­i­cizes only an inor­di­nate obses­sion with keep­ing peo­ple out and not wel­com­ing peo­ple in.

That is “not in the Gospel,” he says, and the pope is right. In fact, Leviti­cus 19:34 says:

The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as your­self; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

A per­son who thinks only about build­ing walls, and not wel­com­ing peo­ple in, is not heed­ing this com­mand of Scrip­ture, which is nowhere done away with by the Gospel. And the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church, §2241, tells us this:

The more pros­per­ous nations are oblig­ed, to the extent they are able, to wel­come the for­eign­er in search of the secu­ri­ty and the means of liveli­hood which he can­not find in his coun­try of ori­gin. Pub­lic author­i­ties should see to it that the nat­ur­al right is respect­ed that places a guest under the pro­tec­tion of those who receive him.

It is also impor­tant to note that the pope only has the reporter’s descrip­tion of Trump’s pol­i­cy to go on. Remem­ber what Pul­lel­la said: Trump pro­pos­es to sep­a­rate fam­i­lies by his immi­gra­tion plan! The pope is respond­ing to the way the reporter char­ac­ter­ized the issue, and is doing so as a gen­er­al obser­va­tion.

Third, when the pope does turn to Trump at the end of his answer, he phras­es his response in the con­di­tion­al, “if.” “If this man said these things,” etc. He is care­ful to admit the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the reporter’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is false. (The fact that the pope refers to Trump as “this man” sug­gests to me that he has no idea who he is, let alone what his actu­al pol­i­cy and words are.) “We must see,” the pope says, “if he said things in this way, and in this I give him the ben­e­fit of the doubt.” Inter­est­ing: The pope gives Trump the ben­e­fit of the doubt, but he does not give Pul­lel­la the ben­e­fit of the doubt that he is char­ac­ter­iz­ing Trump’s words accu­rate­ly. Did you catch that?

If only we would treat the pope the way the pope treats Don­ald Trump: giv­ing him the ben­e­fit of the doubt, not accept­ing a reporter’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion at face val­ue, and going to see whether he actu­al­ly said these things.

Final­ly, as to the pope’s words “this man is not Chris­t­ian,” a Face­book friend, native Span­ish speak­er, and Catholic priest explains the sense of the orig­i­nal Span­ish. (It is in this thread from Feb­ru­ary 18.)

The words would be trans­lat­ed to say one’s ideas and atti­tude are anti­thet­i­cal to the Gospel. The mean­ing is not that one is out­side the mem­ber­ship of the bap­tized.

The equiv­a­lent in Eng­lish would be when we say that a per­son is “unAmer­i­can” but we do not mean they are an ille­gal alien.

In Span­ish, to say a per­son is not a bap­tized Chris­t­ian or that they have left Chris­tian­i­ty, you would use anoth­er phrase, such as, “es de otra reli­gion” or “no es miem­bro de la Igle­sia.

Such nuances do not always neat­ly car­ry over when words are trans­lat­ed into anoth­er lan­guage, and one has to always keep that in mind when try­ing to dis­cern the right sense of what some­one is say­ing. We par­tic­u­lar­ly owe that cour­tesy to the Vic­ar of Christ.

As for Ann Coul­ter, she has this sense that it is all well and good to be Catholic, as long as your first loy­al­ty is to Amer­i­ca (by which she means a par­tic­u­lar­ly crude form of nation­al­ism). If your loy­al­ty is to Church teach­ing and the Vic­ar of Christ, then you are a “ROMAN Catholic” as opposed to an “AMERICAN” one. You may even be a trai­tor!

She mix­es this with good old-fash­ioned Know Nothingism, a form of Amer­i­can anti-Catholi­cism that fears the pope will reach his arm across the Atlantic and med­dle in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Remem­ber 1960, when peo­ple feared that John F. Kennedy would take orders from the pope if elect­ed? I am sor­ry to see that Sean Han­ni­ty, a Catholic, has him­self suc­cumbed to this brand of Know Nothingism.

When you look at the pope’s actu­al words, they do not sup­port any of these fears. The pope specif­i­cal­ly refus­es to address nation­al secu­ri­ty ques­tions or tell peo­ple how to vote. What he does say, about wel­com­ing strangers and not just build­ing walls to keep peo­ple out, is what the Scrip­ture and the Cat­e­chism have long told us. And it is the pope’s job to tell us about those things.

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished at Catholic Stand on Feb­ru­ary 21, 2016.