Commissioning him to bring Church "unity" over the issue of illegal immigration, Pope Leo XIV decided to name El Paso's Trump-hating, open-borders-advocating, Bishop Mark Seitz as his mouthpiece, not wanting to get into back-and-forth with President Trump himself over the matter the way Pope Francis did.
According to Reuters:
The pope picked that guy?
The one who, during the Biden administration, escorted rejected phony asylum seekers back over the border into the U.S. in blatant disrespect for U.S. immigration law? People who actually had their "due process" as the lefties like to say now, and got sent home but wouldn't take 'no' for an answer?
The guy who kneeled before George Floyd, and wore a rainbow liturgical stole like some white guys wear dashikis as a sort of woke lefty status symbol to demonstrate his capacity to travel to sufficiently exotic foreign lands?
The guy in the middle of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's investigation of migrant-trafficking NGOs?
This is not the guy who's going to be able to persuade anyone among the rather divided Catholic Church, building bridges, finding a happy medium with all its members. He's a fanatic political operative one calls on to shore up a shriveling radical base.
According to the moderately leftish Crux magazine:
Crux Now: What do you expect from collaboration with the Holy Father on this? You said he wants to work directly with the bishops. Do you have any hopes in that regard?
Bishop Mark J. Seitz: I think basically what he is saying is – as I understood – that the Church will continue to teach on this issue. It’s not a new teaching, but [the Church] will continue to reinforce what her teaching is. That’s her job. But [Pope Leo] also expects the bishops, in their national organization, but also in their dioceses, to speak to these fundamental issues of the Church’s teaching. And he made it clear that he would like to see more of that. So, we hope that we can respond.
It sounds like a ramp-up of the divisive rhetoric we have already been hearing from the bishops, the kind that sees all illegal aliens as saints without a single criminal, ingrate, chiseler, or anti-American among them, truly an unrealistic portrait based on an a sort of revolutionary faith, and not the hard facts on the ground that Americans deal with.
The concerns of Americans citizens who voted for President Trump to stop the exploitative border surge, and that includes a majority of Catholic voters, count for nothing, going completely unacknowledged, and ignored. I've never seen Seitz admit that mass migration has ever caused any problems, he's as open borders as they come, willing to employ coached sob stories as he did with the pope, repeating his one-on-one meetings with sleazy Joe Biden, but this time with the new pope. Nor have I ever heard a hint of condemnation from him about the global creators of poverty and migration -- that might mean criticizing a socialist, which lefties won't do. To Seitz, anyone who disapproves of Biden's border surge and misuse of asylum, is a heretic, a non-Catholic, heck, a non-person, a person to be disregarded. Speaking of marginalization ...
That's not the way to building any kind of unity -- it's the way to creating an ever deeper divide.
If the pope really wanted unity with the flock, he would have done better to appoint a moderate like Cardinal Timothy Dolan or Bishop Robert Barron to the task of bridging and repairing the political divides, finding ways to compromise on border security and customer service issues for repatriates, rather than condemning all mass deportations and effectively calling for open borders.
By unity, Pope Leo seems to mean making all the bishops speak in lockstep, which would probably lead to a lot of forced resignations, and petty yankings of benefits, the way Pope Francis, who brooked no nuance of thought, liked to do. But it would hardly lead the flock to unity as ordinary Catholics just continue to ignore the coordinated messaging and Democrat-style talking points and carry on to support President Trump.
Seitz is a particularly bad choice because he is a well-known Trump-hater. He's called Trump 'authoritarian' and even blamed Trump for the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
“What we’re seeing is that migrants are scapegoats in a crisis with much deeper roots—ethical, social, economic and political,” he said. “Migrants are the unfortunate canaries in the coal mine.” “We can’t ignore the seams that are falling apart in the American project,” Bishop Seitz told the conference. Noting “another frightening example of political violence” in the murder on Sept. 10 of conservative activist Charles Kirk, Bishop Seitz said, “It’s up to leadership to set the tone, and our political leadership today is both setting a deeply troubling tone and also using the instruments of state for politicized and frightful means, including how we approach immigration enforcement.” He warned that the nation’s “slide into authoritarianism” had to be acknowledged. “Scholars tell us that things like this don’t happen overnight; they happen slowly at first and then very quickly, and the vulnerable and people who are different are among the first casualties.”
Given his wokesterliness and disrespect for American Catholics' concerns and voting choices, I suspect this 'unity' idea won't work out the way Pope Leo thinks it will work out. It's bad enough an idea to think that 'unity' isn't the aim. All I can see ahead from this is just forced conformity and forced violations of individual conscience on what the Church calls discretionary "prudential matters" of opinion and legitimate choice.
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