By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Sunday criticized President-elect Donald Trump’s reported plan to sharply intensify immigration enforcement actions throughout the U.S. within the days after his inauguration.
In an Italian tv interview, the pontiff stated it might be a “disgrace” if Trump went ahead with the plan, in unusually forceful language for the chief of the worldwide Catholic Church.
“It would make the migrants, who have nothing, pay the unpaid bill,” stated the pope. “It doesn’t work. You don’t resolve problems this way.”
The pope’s remarks have been made throughout a video hyperlink from his Vatican residence with the “Che Tempo Che Fa” program on Italy’s Channel 9.
Francis, chief of the 1.4 billion member church, is often cautious about weighing in on political points.
The pope has made welcoming migrants a key theme of his almost 12-year papacy, and he has beforehand criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. In the course of the 2016 election, he stated Trump was “not Christian” in his view.
Incoming Trump administration officers stated on Saturday that the president-elect was reconsidering plans for immigration raids in Chicago subsequent week, following reviews concerning the plans.
Earlier on Sunday, Chicago’s Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, additionally criticized the deliberate raids. “This would be an affront to the dignity of all people and communities,” the cardinal stated in a press release.
