VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: Perhaps because I have a Catholic wife and daughters, I practice a sort of Dissident Right Political Correctness and try to leave criticizing the Catholic Church’s role in the immigration debate (no worse than that of my own appalling ECUSA, but more important) to angry Catholic patriots, a substantial group. With the hoopla surrounding the Pope’s visit, however, I can’t stand it anymore—here Brenda Walker expresses a more traditionally Protestant view. As I wrote over nine years ago: “The post-1965 immigration disaster, and the bishops' foolish response to it, threatens to revive a controversy about the Catholic Church in America that had been dormant since the days of Nation editor Paul Blanshard's 1949 best-selling polemic American Freedom and Catholic Power …”

Pope and change? In 2013, newly-crowned Pope Francis used his first trip outside of the Vatican to visit the southerly Italian island of Lampedusa and welcome illegal alien Africans to Europe. In doing so, he was endorsing the Leftist narrative that the affluent First World should rescue the downtrodden billions of the Third World. Now the Pope has scheduled a tour of three American cities for September 22-27, and he has big immigration plans for us too. He’s even helpfully indicating what continued immigration will mean: only FOUR (4) of his 18 US speeches will be in English; the rest in Spanish. [In U.S., pope to give 14 speeches in Spanish, 4 in English, CBS, September 15, 2015] American patriots should tell this foreign potentate, in Spanglish so he understands: Vamoose!

Pope Francis has been invited by GOP Speaker John Boehner to address a joint session of Congress, a unique honor for a religious figure—and one that arguably violates the separation of church and state. The Dalai Lama has visited Washington numerous times, but with no opportunity to speak to the legislature about Tibet’s struggle against Red China. In 2008, President George Bush welcomed Pope Benedict to the White House, with 9,000 guests in attendance (Benedict spoke English) but no speech to Congress.

Why? Perhaps because Speaker Boehner is one of 169 Catholics in Congress—who are lobbied hard for Amnesty by Catholic Church elites. [Democrats Try to Recruit Pope Francis for Immigration Cause, By Thomas H. Williams, Breitbart, August 23, 2015]

For example, in September 2013, Catholic Church leaders organized an Amnesty Sunday, urging priests to preach the gospel of Open Borders to the flock, and to lead special prayers for “safe migration.” [Catholic Church getting more aggressive on immigration reform, By Cindy Carcamo, Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2013] In November 2013, Cardinal Dolan wrote a widely circulated letter to the Speaker, arguing that it is a “moral matter” for the legislators to extend legal protections toward the “undocumented” etc.

Was the invite a Catholic consolation prize for Speaker Boehner’s not pushing the nation-breaking Gang of Eight Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill through the House? We’ll never hear that confession.

Certainly the Speaker’s invitation piled on the Pope-praise:

Speaker Boehner Invites Pope Francis to Address Joint Meeting of Congress | Speaker.gov

It is with reverence and admiration that I have invited Pope Francis, as head of state of the Holy See and the first Pope to hail from the Americas, to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress.

Pope Francis has inspired millions of Americans with his pastoral manner and servant leadership, challenging all people to lead lives of mercy, forgiveness, solidarity, and humble service.

His tireless call for the protection of the most vulnerable among us—the ailing, the disadvantaged, the unemployed, the impoverished, the unborn—has awakened hearts on every continent.” [More]

(Emphasis added).

Well, I am one of the even more millions of Americans who are emphatically not “inspired.” I believe the Catholic Church has spent millions of dollars to lobby for Amnesty and increased immigration simply and solely because without Hispanic immigrants of the faith, the Church in the U.S. would be shrinking rapidly—due to its abject failure to inspire parishioners’ loyalty.

A May 2015 report from Pew Research, America’s Changing Religious Landscape, painted a truly dire picture:

Both the mainline and historically black Protestant traditions have lost more members than they have gained through religious switching, but within Christianity the greatest net losses, by far, have been experienced by Catholics. Nearly one-third of American adults (31.7%) say they were raised Catholic. Among that group, fully 41% no longer identify with Catholicism. This means that 12.9% of American adults are former Catholics, while just 2% of U.S. adults have converted to Catholicism from another religious tradition. No other religious group in the survey has such a lopsided ratio of losses to gains.

My emphases.

The Main Stream Media has been happy to promote Pope Francis as a more charming pontiff than the scholarly Benedict. Normal guy Francis has an ’84 Renault for tooling around the Vatican grounds , and he recently showed up at a Rome optician to get new lenses in his glasses.

It’s odd, then, that a man supposedly so modest would be purposefully rude to the national hosts of his upcoming tour by promoting the curse of institutional bilingualism, let alone by calling for their demographic replacement by Hispanic immigrants. Americans are an English-speaking people. Minimal English from the Pope further underlines the point that he is visiting to propagandize for increased Hispanic immigration—with no mention of legality.

English is the nearest thing to a universal language on earth. Knowledge of it is vital for assimilation in the U.S.—as well as for making more money. One might think the Pope would at least care about the latter for his flock and set a good example. But no.

In addition, one of the Pope’s Spanish-language events will be a Mass on September 23 in Washington D.C. to declare Junipero Serra a saint. Clearly this is meant to be a twofer territory-marking event—Spanish plus Catholicism in the U.S.

Outrageously, Pope Francis has characterized Serra as “one of the founding fathers of the United States.” [Pope Francis celebrates Junipero Serra at Rome's North American College, Vatican Radio, May 5, 2015] To be clear, Serra was a Spanish Franciscan priest who established missions in California back in the 1700s when the west coast was claimed by Spain. (One of Serra’s churches is the oldest building in San Francisco, Mission Dolores, located just three blocks from a BART station.)

But does Pope Francis think that constructing churches to convert local Indians to Catholicism in Spanish territory is connected somehow to English Protestants inventing a unique representative government 3000 miles away?

Is the Pope a dope—or is he trying to rewrite American history to portray Catholics as major figures in the Founding? In fact, out of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, only one was a Catholic: Charles Carroll of Maryland. Out of 55 signers of the Constitution, two were Catholic: Daniel Carroll and Thomas Fitzsimmons, both Marylanders.

Significantly, the Serra canonization won’t go by without controversy in diverse America. Spanish-speaking Hispanics may be pleased with the idea, but many Native Americans are not. They claim that the Spanish priests enslaved local people in the missions and blocked their culture and languages. [Pope’s apology doesn’t change California Native Americans’ opinions on canonization, By Joelle Burnette, KRON4.com, September 5, 2015]

Thought experiment: if the thousands crossing America’s southern border daily were Lutherans and Methodists rather than Roman Catholics, would the pope encourage their continued illegal immigration to America?

I must stipulate: these attacks on American sovereignty are a policy of Church elites, not patriotic parishioners. Ordinary Catholic church-goers want law and borders—as shown by a 2009 Zogby poll in which 64 percent preferred immigration enforcement to Amnesty. [Religious Leaders vs. Members: An Examination of Contrasting Views on Immigration, By Steven A. Camarota, December 2009

Meanwhile, the continent where the Pope resides is reeling from a “migrant” crisis of Biblical proportions, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians are fleeing civil war, and diverse others from Senegal to Afghanistan are seeking free stuff in the First World.

The MSM is portraying the mad rush into Europe as being a humanitarian crisis (see Treatment of Migrants Evokes Memories of Europe’s Darkest Hour,  By Rick Lyman, NYT, September 4, 2015) when it is really a huge security threat. The jihadists see the chaos as an opportunity to infiltrate their people into the heart of Europe, and have said as much. [ISIS smuggler: 'We will use refugee crisis to infiltrate West', WND, September 4, 2015] What’s happening is a hijra – jihad by immigration.

As UKIP leader Nigel Farage observed about jihad in April

“When ISIS say they want to flood our continent with half a million Islamic extremists they mean it, and there is nothing in this document [Common European Asylum Policy] that will stop them.

“I fear we face a direct threat to our civilization if we allow large numbers of people from that war torn region into Europe.”

[Farage Warns of Real and Genuine ISIS Threat from Mediterranean Crisis, Breitbart, April 29, 2015]

The jihadists have vowed to defeat the Vatican and murder the pope—not to mention turning Europe Islamic. Mohammed told his followers to conquer Rome and Constantinople, half of which they have already accomplished. The anti-jihad scholar Robert Spencer’s recent book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS includes a need-to-know list one item of which is the deadline for conquering Rome: 2020 – and “Rome” means the Vatican in jihad-speak.

Destroying Christianity has long been a major goal of Islam. Allah’s gangsters have nearly succeeded in completely wiping it out of North Africa and the Middle East over the past 1400 years. War, torture and mass murder will do that. It is shocking to see now only because this is the first jihad to be televised, just as the Armenian genocide was the first jihad to be photographed.

So why isn’t Pope Francis paying more attention to a real danger? Didn’t the news about the numerous jihad attacks in Europe over decades reach Argentina? His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was shot and nearly killed in 1980 by Mehmet Ali A?ca, a Turk of sketchy background.

But instead, the Pope is showing serious signs of pathological Islamo-innocence. In early September, he urged European Catholics to offer sanctuary to refugees—and he didn’t specify Middle Eastern Christians, who have been driven from their historic homes in the region. [Pope calls on Europe's Catholics to shelter refugees, CBS, September 6, 2015] (But several days later, he backtracked, acknowledging that “incredibly cruel” ISIS could infiltrate among the crowds).

Another goal of Pope Francis’ visit: to pretty up the image of the Catholic Church in the U.S., which is no small chore. The priest sex-abuse scandal continues to have legs, even though it has mysteriously disappeared from national news. Trials, investigations and lawsuits bubble along locally, draining trust from the institution among parishioners. A Google News search in mid-September for Catholic Priest Child Sex Abuse got 106,000 results for a 30-day period. BishopAccountability.org estimates that more than 17,000 survivors have come forward, while many more suffer in silence.

A September 10 Guardian article (Ongoing child sex abuse in Catholic church casts shadow on pope's US visit) opines that while Francis has taken steps to address the issue, the Vatican culture of secrecy remains stubbornly in place, and little has been done on the local level. An abuse survivor, Peter Isely, is quoted: “No matter how one feels about the Pope, he has had no impact here in Milwaukee.”

Bottom line: The Pope is pushing an agenda that does not align with American values in fundamental ways. His Open-Borders immigration plan is part of a belief in global redistribution, a Marxist ideology with an added veneer of dopey do-gooder Christianity. Liberation Theology is popular in South America—Francis is an Argentine—and includes the idea that successful countries share riches with failing Third-World states. Perhaps Francis got some tips on making socialism work when he met with Fidel Castro in the Cuba part of his international tour.

The Pope apparently regards capitalism as a great evil, rather than a generator of wealth. Thus in July he visited Bolivia to attend the World Meeting of Popular Movements. Presidente Evo Morales gave the Pope a Hammer-And-Sickle crucifix, perhaps as a little leftward nudge to the “Pope of the poor.”

The Vatican posted the text of Francis’ 55-minute speech, which included remarks like:

“The economy should not be a mechanism for accumulating goods, but rather the proper administration of our common home. This entails a commitment to care for that home and to the fitting distribution of its goods among all.”

The Catholic Church is a big government operation itself and simpatico with other systems of control—all in the name of virtuous behavior, of course.

But the United States of America was founded on a different principle—that of human freedom based on limited, representative government. Quite simply, America is a result of the Reformation. Many in the founding generations of Protestants came for religious freedom and to escape oppression acting in the name of faith. Traditional Americans don’t like kings, and founders fought a revolution to be rid of them. Religious kings are a double bad.

Much of the historical American sentiment smeared as “anti-Catholic” is actually a rejection of all kings and oppressive rule in Europe, where the Vatican acted as a government.

The Pope has plenty to occupy his time with promoting the spiritual health of his flock. More Jesus and less Marx would be an improvement for the largest Christian denomination.

At the very least, the Pope should restrain his immigration enthusiasm and be a polite guest while visiting the United States—a sovereign nation with borders and citizens and a culture of its own.

Brenda Walker [Email her] lives in northern California and publishes the blog LimitsToGrowth.org.