Immigration and the Pope

The pope’s visit to Mexico and his criticism of Trump brought more attention to his support of massive immigration from Latin America into the United States.  Various people have speculated as to why he cares – often attributing it to his generally  leftist political opinions.  While that should not be discounted,  there is another reason that I think is important.

People these days often forget that the  papacy is and for centuries has been a political as well as a religious office.  Historically popes have been active participants in geopolitics with the goal of preserving and extending the power and domain of their office and the  Catholic church.  For the last two hundred years since Waterloo, the world’s dominant political and economic power has been a mainly protestant nation with strong liberal and secularist  components and tendencies. There is no reason to believe this is anything other than undesirable to the Catholic church.

The facts make it plain that the chances of any Catholic nation supplanting the United States in that role are effectively nil.  Without that happening the next best thing from the viewpoint of the papacy  would be to make the United States more Catholic.  Since a majority of people in Latin America are Catholics, mass immigration to the United States from Latin America would serve that purpose.  That, I think, is a natural and simple at least partial explanation for the pope’s interest in such immigration.