The Pope Has Refuted J.D. Vance's Theological Justification for Deportations

You know it's bad when the Pope is telling you that you've got your own religion wrong. In a letter to Catholic bishops in the U.S., Pope Francis rebuked the Trump administration's goal of mass deportation, calling it a "major crisis."

Although he didn't call out Vice President J.D. Vance by name, there are many who suspect that the Pope was addressing the vice president throughout the letter. Here's why they think that, and what the letter actually said.

Although the letter is not explicitly addressed to Vance, many have interpreted parts of it as a rebuke to Vance's theological justification for the mass deportation policy.

In the letter, Francis said that it was important for bishops not to suggest that migrants who had traveled to the U.S. were criminals, even if they had entered the country through informal channels.

He also said that many of the migrants had left their countries due to exploitation, poverty, or threats of violence, and deporting them "damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness."

The section that seems to respond to Vance comes after Vance suggested that Americans should care about their families, community, and country before showing compassion to people from other parts of the world.

Francis wrote instead that Catholics should find ways to extend their love to all people, everywhere, refuting Vance's assertion of the Catholic notion of ordo aramis, or a hierarchy of care.

"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups," he wrote. Francis went on to more explicitly correct Vance's interpretation of the term.

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception," he wrote.

Tom Homan, the Trump administration's border czar who is Catholic, said that the Pope should keep his opinions about America's border policies to himself.

“He wants to attack us for securing our border. He’s got a wall around the Vatican, does he not?” Homan told reporters. “So he’s got a wall around that protects his people and himself, but we can’t have a wall around the United States.”

Francis, the first Latin American pope, has long made compassion for migrants core to his interpretation of Catholicism, but it seems that some in the U.S. don't want to listen to the Pope despite his ordained place at the top of their religion.

While the Pope's letter probably won't change the minds of Vance or many in the Trump administration, it's a remarkably explicit rebuke of how some on the right have interpreted Catholic teachings. Religious views are certainly open to interpretation, but it probably stings to see a letter chastising you from the head of your church.