By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Some words Pope Francis recently spoke about Mexico didn’t get as much attention in or by the media as his alleged condemnation of Donald Trump’s conscience on wall-building, where the headlines soared higher than that planned border barrier.
So Francis urging Mexican self-improvement didn’t get the gleam like the media spotlight on the supposed shame of the billionaire Republican presidential candidate.
The self-help counsel from the Pope was reported, but it didn’t feed the left-wing narrative that the people of the United States have an obligation to shoulder most or all of Mexico’s shrugged-off responsibilities.
Reuters news service reported that in poverty-riddled Ecatepec on February 14, Francis “urged his listeners to struggle to make Mexico ‘a land of opportunities where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream’ and where drug traffickers, whom he called ‘dealers of death,’ would not ensnare their children.
“Mexico is home to one of the world’s richest men, billionaire Carlos Slim, and a wealthy political class stained by corruption even as much of the country is steeped in poverty and violence,” the Reuters story added.
Ecatepec is a populous suburb of Mexico City.
A February 14 Associated Press story said: “In a final prayer at the end of Mass on Sunday, Francis urged the hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in the gritty suburb of Ecatepec to be on the ‘front lines’ in forging Mexico’s future.
“He urged them to make their country ‘a land of opportunities, where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream, no need to be exploited in order to work, no need to make the despair and poverty of many the opportunism of a few, a land that will not have to mourn men and women, young people and children who are destroyed at the hands of the dealers of death’.”
Shortly before those comments, the Chicago Tribune posted a story February 13 under the headline, “Pope Francis gives tough love to Mexico’s political, Church elite.”
The story said that in a “hard-hitting speech to his own bishops, Francis challenged Church leaders known for their deference to Mexico’s wealthy and powerful to courageously denounce the ‘insidious threat’ posed by the drug trade and not hide behind their own privilege and careers.”
The Tribune continued: “Francis’ entire . . . trip to Mexico is shining an uncomfortable spotlight on the Church’s shortcomings and the government’s failure to solve entrenched social ills that plague many parts of the country — poverty, rampant drug-inspired gangland killings, extortion, disappearances of women, crooked cops and failed public services.”
Reymundo Torres, an Arizona resident and third-generation Mexican-American, told The Wanderer in a February 20 interview that “Mexico purports to be one of the most Catholic countries in the world,” but the religious observance can be superficial, with cultic practices including the skeletal “Saint Death” also winning people’s loyalties.
Sometimes this cultic grim reaper is honored by people who think they can be Catholic at the same time. “Saint Death” often is identified with Latino drug gangs.
Ecatepec is known not only for its poverty but also for gangs and illegal immigration to the U.S., Torres, an orthodox Catholic, said.
Torres recently stepped down as president of the conservative Arizona Latino Republican Association as he runs for a seat in Arizona’s House of Representatives to represent state District 8.
Reuters reported that Ecatepec “is home to a giant statue of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a cult figure followed by millions across the Americas.”
When he was a young man in the U.S., Torres’ parents had sent him to Mexico City to learn Spanish and attend university. Today he speaks knowledgeably of history and culture in both nations and beyond.
“I wholeheartedly agreed with” the Pope when he spoke about Mexico’s own responsibilities to improve, Torres told The Wanderer. However, “his message changes, his context changes” to “whatever he thinks will win the crowd. . . . This Pope is so riddled with political missteps.”
Both the symbolism and his sermon changed in the border city of Ciudad Juarez on February 17, across the international line from El Paso.
There were crosses to represent illegal immigrants who lost their lives while unsuccessfully trying to slip into the U.S. On the crosses were images resembling Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and their donkey, presumably fleeing to Egypt.
However, the Holy Family willingly returned home at the instruction of an angel, not demanding Egyptian citizenship or permanent residence where the plan of God didn’t want them to be.
In Ciudad Juarez the Pope preached, “I know of the work of countless civil organizations working to support the rights of migrants. I know, too, of the committed work of so many men and women religious, priests, and lay people in accompanying migrants and in defending life.”
The Wall Street Journal quoted a “migrant” that he had a great desire to cross the border, and that the Catholic Church had assisted him on his journey north.
Here came a familiar blurring of terms and erasure of facts, well-known in the liberal politics of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and of the pro-illegal immigration Mexican hierarchy.
Despite the United States’ great efforts to welcome millions of legal immigrants year after year and to extend aid to the needy around the world, a person might think the U.S. is to blame if it were to dare resist an illegal invasion by countless unauthorized line-jumpers who cut ahead of everyone else. And that the U.S. must be denied its national sovereignty and its freedom to address its own people’s welfare as the priority.
Meanwhile, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, his country’s corrupt establishment, and debilitating Latino socialism usually have no fingers pointed against their guilt.
It’s as if a Senor Garcia sinfully kicks his entire family out of their home but he escapes all blame, while the Smith family next door is denounced and excoriated if it doesn’t immediately bring all his family under their own roof, legally adopt them, and give them joint ownership of the Smith family bank accounts.
And remember to multiply this injustice by the millions.
Pope Francis on his flight back to Rome was asked about Donald Trump’s defense of wall-building. The Pope replied, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the Gospel.”
Is it possible the Pope hadn’t heard that presidential candidate Trump wants a wall with “a big, beautiful door”? So Trump isn’t “only” about building walls. And how many more bridges do millions more illegal immigrants need to slip into the U.S. before their defiance is satiated?
Where in the Gospels does it say people are forbidden to protect themselves from being overrun? Walls are for crowd control “wherever they may be,” from the Vatican to the White House to the USCCB.
The reason the U.S. has a very incomplete border fence, but needs much more of one, is that nations to the south have shown they can’t be trusted to treat their own people with the Christian respect due to human beings that the Pope requires, but instead shuffle them northward like inconvenient pawns.
Latino lands, with all their resources, both human and material, have a great capacity for improvement, if their politicians would make the effort, as Francis suggested in Ecatepec. Perhaps one way to impel them to change would be to insist that they can’t kick their own people out of their homelands, a tactic to avoid having to reform. It just might work.
By the early 1990s in the U.S., liberals had written off their own New York City as ungovernable — mainly because it was addled by too much liberalism. Then Democrat-turned-Republican Rudolph Giuliani was elected as a reform mayor, and his tough love turned the city around, from despair to hope.
Torres, the conservative Arizona Republican and Catholic, said even conservative bishops in the Mexican hierarchy are pro-illegal immigration.
If they only are encouraged to continue this fruitless path, reform seems sinfully improbable.
The Vatican’s Wall
However, a retired U.S. border drug enforcer told The Wanderer on February 18 that some basic controls would make a major difference to discourage illegal immigration.
Kirk Fowler, who had been in charge of all intelligence for Mexico and Central America for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), said, “If you really want to stop the illegal immigration situation,” employers should use the authorized E-Verify Internet system to establish a worker’s U.S. eligibility, with a $5,000 fine for an offending employer.
If benefits are cut off for illegal immigrants here, Fowler said, they’ll go back home.
“We do it to ourselves” if illegal immigration is allowed to continue, he said.
Fowler said he chased drug peddlers both in the U.S. and Mexico.
Earlier in the interview, Fowler, a Catholic, said, “If you go to the Vatican, they’ve got a wall 20 or 30 feet high there, it’s a really high wall. So I just think it’s a huge mistake for the Pope to get involved in politics,” as he did by being drawn into making comments on Christian behavior and Trump.
Torres told The Wanderer that Francis should be more careful in his comments, instead of “wading into waters where he has no mandate to speak of.” Torres added later: “More than anything, I really wish this papacy would get ahold of the problems that plague the Church,” such as declining attendance and practice of the faith, rather than other issues.
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