Leo XIV’s sermon on Pentecost Sunday took its keynote from Benedict XVI. On Pentecost, 2005, Benedict proclaimed: “The Spirit opens borders… She [the Church] must open the borders between peoples and break down the barriers between class and race. In her, there cannot be those who are neglected or disdained.”
Benedict was not the first pope to oblige globalism by doing theology with one eye on geopolitics. Massive problems have followed that trajectory. Some are on view right now in the streets of Los Angeles. But you are watching and reading about them elsewhere. Let me stay with our current bard of the universal Social Gospel preached as the word of God.
In his sermon on Pentecost Sunday, Leo XIV repeated the word “borders” some eleven times. Incremental repetition is a rhetorical device to enhance mood. It lends accumulated weight to a desired emotional effect. A balladeer’s technique, it signals Leo’s conception of his role as the anointed rhapsodist of faith and worship in service to utopian political and economic ends. The open borders chorale views the West—America in particular—as a global welfare program for failed states. Leo’s messianic pretension carries over from his uneven predecessor. It comes fluently, delivered in phrasing composed for ears susceptible to mellifluous sanctimony.
Leo’s sermon began on a high note: “The Spirit opens borders, first of all, in our hearts.” It dropped quickly into a chastisement that obliquely stigmatized its listeners:
His presence breaks down our hardness of heart, our narrowness of mind, our selfishness, the fears that enchain us and the narcissism that makes us think only of ourselves. The Holy Spirit comes to challenge us, to make us confront the possibility that our lives are shrivelling up, trapped in the vortex of individualism.
Ah, yes, that whirling vortex called daily living. Leo’s word “us” incorporates ordinary individuals who struggle to pay their bills and manage debt, who juggle jobs, marital issues, and children’s well-being while they cope with a family member’s illness, disability, or death. Viewed from a Third-Worldist’s choir loft, these are the narcissists who chafe under a diktat to welcome all comers to our country without demanding even legality of them. Anyone who expects aliens to enter our country the way our own parents and grandparents did—by standing in queue and following lawful protocols—is a mark of our “rigidity,” our “hardness of heart and narrowness of mind.”
Let the designated “marginalized and excluded”—enshrined in Leo’s May 10th talk to the College of Cardinals— step forward to claim benefits. Leave the undesignated marginalized (e.g., homeless Veterans, our own working poor, or laid off workers in energy and manufacturing) to content themselves with the “joy of fraternity.”
Leo discerns the Spirit “opening borders in our relationship with others,” and “broadening the borders of our relationships.” Needless to say, the Spirit blesses “open borders between peoples.” Let our lives “become places of welcome and refreshment.” Those we welcome have no obligation to reciprocate. Flying their own national flag, they need not treat us as their neighbors. Our welcome must a pure oblation.
Spend a moment to read the full sermon. It is not long. Just long enough to reveal a degree of moral vanity at the core of this new pontificate.
It is also long enough to confirm J.D. Vance’s comments to Fox News this past January:
There is something very deranged in the mind of the far left in this country, where I really do think they feel more of a sense of compassion for illegal aliens who have no right to be in this country than they do for their fellow citizens.
As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens.
It doesn’t mean that you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there is this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way – you love your family, and then you love neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
James Orr, writing in First Things, agreed with J.D. Vance’s grasp of ordo amoris, the order of love:
The philosopher and atheist Bernard Williams once remarked that the man who, when faced with the choice of saving his drowning wife or a drowning stranger, hesitates to consider which course of action would contribute more to the overall good of humanity has had one thought too many. Americans should be thankful that in their new vice president they have a leader who is not going to hesitate to put his own people first.
Robert Prevost thought otherwise. He took to social media to retweet a post from the National Catholic Reporter that appeared three months before the May conclave:
But it was Prevost who was wrong. Or, if you prefer, the National Catholic Reporter. Jesus stated his priorities in his initial rebuff to the Canaanite woman: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. 15:24). Elsewhere he said, “I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.” ( John 17:9). In other words, Jesus had his druthers. He ranked those who were true to him— his own disciples—ahead of others.
Joseph Sobran is a name we do not hear enough these days. A Catholic journalist, he was a brilliant standard bearer of the pro-life movement in the two decades following Roe v. Wade. Yet much of what he wrote in that battle applies to the sentimental humanitarianism fueling religious preoccupation with open borders:
Even as enlightened voices sternly urge us to take responsibility for unseen strangers, they soothingly release us from responsibility to our own children. . . . To put it simply, we are required to love, and provide for our neighbor, and our neighbor’s neighbor, and our neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor, but not our own sons and daughters. This has quite literally given a new meaning to the word “compassion,” which now implies a strangely politicized form of love, at the expense of the more natural kinds.
Note: Sobran’s essays in Single Issues appeared originally in The Human Life Review from 1975 through 1982.
