When discussing the consequences of the Catholic Church’s role in illegal immigration, Elizabeth Yore, former general counsel for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, minced no words.

“This is going to be a catastrophe for our health-care system, our criminal justice system, our educational system,” said Yore, a conservative Catholic. “We’re not going to recognize our society in two years. The crime and the chaos in the schools is going to be unimaginable. We are going to be paying for this for decades, generations.”

That, precisely, is the point.

Recently, The Stream demonstrated how the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops uses taxpayer dollars to fund its human trafficking campaign, thereby enriching the church. But the payment the bishops exact for exploiting poor Latin American migrants exceeds the monetary.

The bishops also use immigration as a weapon to implement Pope Francis’ globalist vision, which demands the eradication of national identity and legitimate national self-interest. That’s why the bishops vehemently opposed President Donald Trump yet show no signs of such a united front against Joe Biden, one of Francis’ favorites.

Rome’s Globalist Ambitions

Francis’ globalist agenda reflects more than six decades of papal policy, as The Stream reported. Starting with the Second Vatican Council, Catholic leaders began emphasizing radically egalitarian and Utopian solutions to besetting world problems. Encyclicals from Popes John XXIII, Paul VI and Benedict XVI refined that policy, with Benedict offering the most pointed approach.

In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict advocated replacing the United Nations with “a true world political authority” to secure “the common good” by regulating national economies, diplomacy and international law. It would have power “to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties,” he wrote, “so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.”

Such an agency, Benedict continued, would “manage the global economy to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration.” Protecting the environment, he added, would involve “a worldwide redistribution of energy resources.” (Emphasis added)

Francis built on that foundation with two encyclicals of his own: Laudato Si on environmental sustainability and Fratelli Tutti on economic redistribution. In 2019, Francis expressed the papal commitment to globalism when the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences met:

The nation-state cannot be considered as an absolute. In the current situation of globalization, the nation-state is no longer able to procure on its own the common good of its populations. The common good has become global and nations must affiliate themselves for their own benefit. When a supranatural common good is clearly identified, it necessitates a specific, legally and concordantly constituted authority capable of facilitating its fulfillment.

In March 2021, during an interview to promote his book, God and the World to Come, Francis said that a “new world order” must emerge from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Let us all keep in mind that there is something worse than this crisis: the drama of wasting it. Instead, we can heal injustice by building a new world order based on solidarity, studying innovative methods to eradicate bullying, poverty and corruption, all working together, each for their own part, without delegating and passing the buck. (Emphasis added)

That November, Francis reiterated that call to the Paris Peace Forum:

Faced with the consequences of the great storm that has shaken the world, our conscience therefore calls us … not to follow the easy path of returning to a ‘normality’ marked by injustice, but to accept the challenge of assuming the crisis as ‘a concrete opportunity for conversion, transformation, to rethink our lifestyle and our economic and social systems.’

The Velvet Glove

Unfettered illegal immigration serves the globalist agenda by eroding national law, identity and culture. Europe provides the prime example. Francis encourages millions of Middle Eastern Muslims to migrate there, regardless of problems surrounding assimilation, and never encourages them to become Christians.

As Francis’ apostolic representatives in the United States, the bishops engage in two tactics to promote his interests.

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez represents the subtle approach. Gomez, born in Mexico, addressed the Catholic Napa Institute in 2011, the year he became archbishop, on immigration’s role in American culture.

After acknowledging and praising the pivotal role Calvinist immigrants to New England and the Founding Fathers played in forging the nation’s identity, Gomez directed his audience’s attention to Spanish colonization in Florida and California.

It is the story not of colonial settlement and political and economic opportunity, Gomez said. It is the story of exploration and evangelization. This story is not Anglo-Protestant but Hispanic-Catholic. It is centered, not in New England but in Nueva España — New Spain — at opposite corners of the continent.

By forgetting “our country’s roots in the Hispanic-Catholic mission to the new world,” Gomez continued, “we end up with an idea that Americans are descended from only white Europeans and that our culture is based only on the individualism, work ethic and rule of law that we inherited from our Anglo-Protestant forebears.”

Gomez then disregards the rule of law by ignoring the illegal status of many immigrants and focusing on their potential.

These immigrants — no matter how they came here — are people of energy and aspiration, he said. This is why I believe our immigrant brothers and sisters are the key to American renewal. And we all know that America is in need of renewal — economic and political, but also spiritual, moral and cultural renewal. I believe these men and women who are coming to this country will bring a new, youthful entrepreneurial spirit of hard work to our economy. I also believe they will help renew the soul of America. (Emphasis added)

Catholics, of course, have their own pivotal role to play.

“Catholics need to lead our country to a new spirit of empathy,” Gomez said. “We need to help our brothers and sisters to start seeing the strangers among us for who they truly are — and not according to political or ideological categories or definitions rooted in our own fears.” 

The Iron Fist

The second tactic is the blatant approach, which San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy represents. In 2017, while still a bishop, McElroy encouraged his audience to act as “disruptors” by encouraging disobedience to immigration law.

“We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families,” he said. “We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies, rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need.”

McElroy’s inflammatory rhetoric not only imitates the “resistance” narrative Trump’s enemies embraced. It silently equates American immigration authorities to Gestapo agents seeking Jews.

In August, McElroy received his reward when Francis made him a cardinal.

But rhetoric means nothing without action. As The Stream reported, an investigation from the Heritage Foundation discovered that Catholic Charities linked almost 3,400 separate mobile phones to anonymous contacts in 433 of the nation’s 435 Congressional districts. The investigation also traced 22,000 cell phones from all NGOs to 431 districts.

“Of the 52 congressional districts with the highest density of devices,” the foundation reported, “71 percent were Republican congressional districts.”

If the Catholic bishops are breathtakingly silent on child trafficking, sex trafficking and drug trafficking, should anyone expect them to encourage immigrants to assimilate and respect national laws? Should anyone expect the bishops to support innocent Americans of all ethnicities victimized by criminal immigrants, especially murder, as in the case of the “Angel Families”?

By supporting and profiting from illegal immigration, the bishops have effectively declared war against their countrymen. By trying to implement Francis’ agenda, the bishops effectively act as agents of a hostile foreign government.

Maureen Mullarkey, a conservative Catholic commentator, powerfully summarized the significance of their stance.

By admonishing voters to ‘humanize globalization,’ the bishops position themselves in the vanguard of a globalist world freed from competing national aims and interests, she wrote. To a clerical elite impatient for the withering away of the national state, an open border is the staging ground for assault on citizenship and national sovereignty.

Not for nothing does Mullarkey call the USCCB “a fifth column in cope and chasuble.”

Joseph D’Hippolito has written commentaries for such outlets as the Jerusalem Post, the American Thinker and Front Page Magazine. He works as a free-lance writer.