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Among the unintended consequences of Pope Francis’ recent letter to the American bishops on immigration, the exposure of his globalist worldview and agenda ranks as the biggest.

FrontPage Magazine has reliably reported on that agenda over the years. But this time, perhaps for the first time, Catholic journalists and analysts are discussing it openly.

Edward Pentin, a veteran Vatican correspondent who has written for numerous print outlets, broached the subject in his most recent blog post.

“Just a fortnight into the Trump presidency and the damage wrought by the Pope and the Vatican allying too closely with Democrat-run globalism on a variety of moral issues is becoming clear,” wrote Pentin, alluding to an article from the director of a Catholic think tank in Italy.

Nine days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Stefano Fontana, who leads the Cardinal Van Thuan International Observatory on the Social Doctrine of the Church, accused the Vatican of colluding with “the owners of the Web, the major press, the universities, the so-called philanthropic foundations, the international agencies, the main Western governments and the management of the European Union,” he wrote, to create “an elitist and totalitarian post-democracy managed by the American Democratic administration” that would enforce policy on immigration, the environment and gender ideology.

FrontPage’s readers might remember Pope Benedict XVI, the ostensible theological conservative, advocating a supranational authority “with teeth,” he wrote, to make economic, social and political decisions for individual countries. Benedict even argued that the nation-state is obsolete because it has become ineffective in making such decisions.

“There are many reasons to argue that the Catholic Church had contributed to that totalitarian system,” wrote Fontana, who argued that such a commitment muted the church’s moral voice on homosexuality and abortion, as FrontPage long argued.

Regarding abortion, the church’s voice “has become feeble and almost absent, preferring to intervene on immigrants and the environment,” Fontana wrote. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 in a 5-4 decision — with all three of Trump’s selections voting to overturn — “the Vatican simply took note,” Fontana wrote. Before Trump pardoned protesters who blocked entrances to abortion clinics, “the Church had not mobilized any protest in their defense.”

Meanwhile, “homosexuality is now accepted as something normal — ‘God loves us as we are,’ ” Fontana wrote, with the church “not willing to fight any battle on the subject.” Fontana cited Francis’ advocacy for legal recognition of same-sex couples and the blessing of same-sex unions, and Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich’s support for same-sex couples adopting children.

His fellow bishops consider Cupich as one of the more notorious papal sycophants.

Yet perhaps the most blatant example of the Vatican’s embrace of globalism concerns COVID-19. Francis not only persuaded Catholics to get the mRNA vaccine as an “act of love,” despite concerns about the use of aborted fetal cells in the vaccine, because “love is also social and political,” he said. The pope not only purged Puerto Rican Bishop Daniel Fernandez Torres for opposing vaccine mandates.

Francis used a Vatican medical conference in 2021 to promote mRNA vaccines (See pages 6 and 7 in the second link). Moderna supplied both the funding for the conference and its CEO, Stephane Bancel, to speak on the potential for such vaccines.

Though ensuing research has shown the COVID-19 vaccines to be ineffective and deadly, neither Francis nor his bishops nor the Vatican as a whole have admitted any responsibility for perpetrating scientific fraud.

“Not a word has been heard, I don’t say of apologies but at least of rethinking or course correction, from the ecclesiastical leaders,” Fontana wrote. “No bishop has said he regretted having closed the churches and sanctuaries in obedience to the WHO, of having supported the self-interested lies of paid virologists, of having forced his priests (even today those who refuse to get vaccinated are opposed and discriminated against in the dioceses).”

For Fontana, the Vatican’s alliance with globalist utopians constitutes moral capitulation.

“The first difficulty of the Catholic Church is precisely … not having been able to free itself from the dominant ideological power … not having defended justice as it should have,” he wrote. Declaring the World Economic Forum to be an ally of common welfare while persuading American bishops not to withhold communion from politicians who support legalized abortion, Fontana added, “demonstrates a line of obsequiousness to the current system of social control.”

R.R. Reno, the Catholic editor of the journal First Things, also connected the pope’s position on immigration to globalism.

“The practical upshot of the Holy Father’s letter is nothing other than the globalist, open borders position, glibly theologized,” Reno wrote Feb. 11. “This, Francis implies, is the only position permitted for true Christians who honor Christ’s universal love.”

In reinforcing the connection between the Vatican and globalist utopians, Reno accuses Francis of exploiting desperate migrants as human shields protecting his “woke” agenda.

“Pope Francis claims to be taking the side of the vulnerable, but his rhetoric aligns with attitudes and statements characteristic of progressive elites,” Reno wrote. “‘Inclusion’ is a tell-word, and it crops up often in papal pronouncements regarding immigration. The Holy Father insists that we must not enforce immigration laws. To do so would lead us ‘to give in to narratives that discriminate.’ That’s the same rationale for not enforcing laws against shoplifting.”

Those human shields also provide the soldiers to trigger the kind of social disintegration that would make a so-called Great Reset necessary. After the COVID-19 pandemic, Francis imitated the WEF in calling for such a reset. In 2021, the Vatican even held a one-day economics conference, “Dreaming of a Better Restart.”

“Reading Pope Francis over the years has led me to believe that he harbors an apocalyptic dream for the West, one in which mass migration and ecological peril overturn the foundations of Western confidence and global hegemony,” Reno wrote. “In this regard, his thinking accords with post-colonial ideologues and those at pro-Hamas rallies.

“The West is a den of iniquity. Its capitalism foments greed. Its enterprises have raped mother nature and polluted the biosphere. Its vainglory, especially American pride, has brought war and ruin to foreign lands. The wretched of the earth are fully within their rights to rise up, migrate, and destroy the Behemoth.”

Francis thus threatens to transform the Catholic Church from a protector of Western civilization, a historic role, to its destroyer.

“I see Pope Francis as more than a wooly-headed moralizer,” Reno wrote. “By all appearances, he’s an accelerationist, someone who welcomes catastrophe rather than appealing to Catholic social doctrine to make nuanced judgments that might help us humanize, as best we can, the policies and actions necessary to prevent the social upheaval that attends rapid demographic change, and the disorder it will bring.

“The Argentine Jesuit seems to relish collapse. It will provide an opportunity to break the iron grip of homo economicus and build a new world, a ‘fraternity open to all.’ This borderless fraternity is a true utopia, a world of no-place, a future universal society free from the grave evil of loyalty to one’s country — Donald Trump’s terrible crime against universal love.”

In other words, Francis becomes John Lennon. Imagine.

Bishop Joseph Strickland — one of Francis’ most forthright critics whom the pope purged from his post in the diocese of Tyler, Texas — argued that the Vatican’s globalist agenda includes a strong monetary component, as FrontPage recently exposed.

“There has long been a concern about the Church’s financial ties — particularly with globalist organizations — as well as concern about government funding and wealthy donors who have a vested interest in certain political outcomes,” Strickland wrote Feb. 13. “Especially in the case of immigration, there is a large financial element at play. Stronger immigration enforcement means less funding for these programs, which is undoubtedly a large factor in the Vatican’s stance.

“On the other hand, abortion and gender ideology do not offer the same direct financial incentives for the Church to oppose them aggressively. While Catholic doctrine condemns these practices unequivocally, to speak out about them risks alienating powerful political allies and financial supporters.”

Those allies include Columbia Economics Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a papal advisor who helped develop the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Sachs wrote a book advocating abortion as a means to limit population worldwide.

For years, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò warned about Francis’ alliance with globalist utopians. Reaction to the pope’s letter on immigration has proven Viganò right.

Not for nothing did Reno call that alliance an “apocalyptic dream” and Francis’ letter a “suicide note.”