Two editorials if you will, the first one is the title given to the annual message of the Pope. The latter is the Wall Street Journal editorial written in 1949 by the late Vermont C. Royster and published annually ever since.
The following excerpt and link is to an article by Monica Showalter at American Thinker who briefs readers on Pope Francis’ utterance . . . and critiques it.
At his Urbi et Orbi Christmas message to the world, he pretty much suggested that anyone in the West who doesn’t want unvetted migrants or who does want any legal process for immigration is a bigot, someone who has a problem with people simply because they are different. As if melting-pot America had anything to be scolded for on that front, given that most of us can name six or seven ancestral nationalities, and the fact that millions of people of all nationalities still migrate here legally, I guess to jump in and enjoy all that supposed bigotry.
“We are all brothers,” he said. “Our differences, then, are not a detriment or a danger; they are a source of richness.”
Maybe he was talking about the racially monolithic Japanese with such a comment. But I kind of doubt it.
We all know what he had in mind, and what’s more, NPR points out that as sexual scandals derived from clerical protection rackets engulf the Church, the Holy Father is turning more and more to advocating for migrants (heading to the West). So here we have his “can’t we all just get along” speech, stating that his fervent wish for the world in the coming year is that French Revolution-derived concept of “fraternity.” Plenty of reason to be suspicious of that one, given the atheist-materialist roots of that particular uprising.
Where it really falls flat is when he starts bringing up particular countries and explains the fraternity wish he has for them. One stands out to me: socialist hellhole Venezuela.
According to Vatican News:
For Venezuelans the Pope hopes they might “recover social harmony” so as to “work fraternally” toward the country’s development.
Social harmony? That’s the root of Venezuela’s problems? That train came and went 20 years ago. Yes, there was social hatred – whipped up by the socialist who led Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, 20 years ago, acting as a genuine socialist. Chávez made war on a substantial portion of the country’s population and sneeringly called on Venezuela’s middle class to just leave the country. He did everything else to end social harmony – declaring war on private property in the name of “social justice,” . . .
Royster’s classic we think also serves as a warning to the fraternal dreams of Pope Francis —
When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar
Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.
But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression — for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?
There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world? . . .
Pope’s Francis is the most political of Pope’s and his policy admonishments in a variety of areas, from climate, to economic “justice” to “migrant rights” can only portend one world government to be effectuated. We pretty much had that once and a Savior came who was not about rendering unto Caesar to fulfill HIS mission. Because this Pope knows no, or at least expresses no limitations on what is Caesar’s, we pray he take the cue from the real savior of the human race that salvation is not in rendering unto Caesar. Indeed they are not the same.
DLH and R Mall
