While it is hard to know how much of what Donald Trump promised to do during the campaign upon become president of the United States, he will certainly do some things that will offend the Catholic Bishops.
Trump spoke of his plan to seal the US-Mexican border (whether or not actually with a wall), deport millions of migrants, and adopt an America-first strategy over international politics and trade, which will target NAFTA and the transpacific and the transatlantic trade treaties.
He has also promised to keep in place decades-old embargos on Cuba, re-impose sanctions and close the recently opened U.S. embassy in Havana, if Cuba does not move away from a one-party state.
“Assuming he goes through with these pledges, Trump next year will slam a truck directly into Pope Francis’s geopolitical objectives in the Americas, and re-define the U.S. Church’s public priorities for a generation.”
The Florida Strait and the US-Mexican border are to Pope Francis what the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were to Pope John Paul II. Pope Francis has tried to replace those walls of division with bridges of fraternity. He energetically mediated an historic diplomatic thaw between Washington and Havana to end Cuba’s isolation.
If Mr. Trump reverts to a hardline strategy with Cuba, it will harden the Castro regime that sees democracy as threatening to swallow up Cuba by its powerful neighbor. And if Trump attempts a mass deportation program, he will encounter resolute Catholic resistance.
There are signs that the “sleeping giant of inter-continental Catholic unity” is beginning to awake. Bishops north and south of the Mexican border with the United States are working on a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the great inter-American synod, held in Aparecida, Brazil called the CELAM General Conference. The celebration will be a powerful and prophetic continental Catholic moment of bridge building to counter the new walls. It will be hard for Pope Francis to resist an invitation to be present.
It Trump carries through with his stated agenda, it is also likely to boost the other papal geo-political objective in the Americas, namely patria grande involving greater Latin-American continental integration. Its part of globalization and involves trade pacts beyond NAFTA including the Andean Pact and Mercosur, and now UNASUR which is a 12 nation Union of South American nations. UNASUR is expected to announce a continent-wide Parliament to be based in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Mexico may join UNASUR if America places high tariffs on Mexican goods.
The Catholic Church’s own continental body CELAM has been a long-standing advocate of uniting South American nations, since the 1950s, long before the trade treaties came into existence.
In other words, it is the Papacy that is behind these trade agreements and globalization. “When it comes to international, continent-wide, border-dissolving initiatives, in short, the Latin-American Church’s experience is second-to-none. And now, with the rise of Trump, under a Latin-American pope who has made immigrants and bridge-building his priority, the Church is set to become a major player: not just by resisting deportations and calling for an end to the Cuba embargo, but by strengthening bodies within, and between, the Americas.”
“And all the world wondered after the beast.” Revelation 13:3.