A few months back I addressed a conspiracy theory: It said that Donald Trump’s chief of strategy Steve Bannon was colluding with doctrinal conservative Cardinal Leo Burke to thwart Pope Francis. There was no substance behind it.

But the fault lines that theory pointed to are real. Catholics in Europe and America are just as divided as their countrymen of other creeds. We are torn between competing theories of how to govern our nations.

Whom should we include? How much power must we grant globalist institutions such as the UN and the EU?

Pope Francis Tells Europe to Abandon Nationalism

Pope Francis has just drawn a line in the sand. In his recent address to European and EU leaders, the pope took a clear swipe at leaders such as Donald Trump, and European patriotic politicians. He warned Europe’s leaders that “[f]orms of populism are … the fruit of an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and ‘looking beyond’ their own narrow vision.”

He even seemed to endorse the rule of technocratic elites like the EU’s unelected commissioners. The pope said:

Politics needs this kind of leadership, which avoids appealing to emotions to gain consent, but instead, in a spirit of solidarity and subsidiarity, devises policies that can make the Union as a whole develop harmoniously.

Should We Prefer Strangers’ Children to Our Own?

Is it “egotism” to want your country’s elected government to protect its national interests? To look out first for its citizens? Is it egotism to put your own children’s interests before those of strangers in foreign countries?

That’s not what St. Thomas Aquinas taught. He wrote that we owe our first duty to our own children, and then to our neighbors.

Do Would-Be Immigrants Have Equal Claims to Citizens?

The pope called for Europe’s states to make “equal room for the native and the immigrant.” Are their claims really “equal”? If so, then hopeful Syrian immigrants have an equal claim on the government of Poland or France as veterans who fought in those country’s wars.

And that’s how governments in many European countries are acting already. Why else would Sweden forbid its police to give physical descriptions of wanted fugitives? (The point was to avoid inflaming “Islamophobia.”) Why would Germany prosecute citizens who criticize its immigration policies?

Does Pope Francis really think that nations should not protect their own citizens first? That people can’t defend their interests through political action? 

To be true Christians we must learn to see strangers as equally important as our children. Every human being is an interchangeable unit.

If he said that, he’d be saying that the fierce love of family and fidelity to a nation is part of the stain of Original Sin. To be true Christians we must renounce it. We must learn to see strangers as equally important to us as our children. Every human being is an interchangeable unit.

Christianity Isn’t Ayn Rand’s Suicidal “Altruism.”

That’s not Christianity, of course. It’s the ugly parody that appears in Ayn Rand’s novels. She scornfully calls it “altruism.” For Rand, the Gospel demands that we prefer other people’s interests to our own. We should care more about foreign children than our own, in the name of a perfect “unselfishness.” 

Pope Francis approves of nationalism, populism, and politics that promote one’s economic self-interest. But not for European peoples or members of the middle class.

C.S. Lewis eloquently dismantled this idea in The Screwtape Letters. The Gospel in fact demands that we trim back and restrain the self-interest we were made with. But we can’t abolish it and shouldn’t try. We must learn the love for others in the school of family and community. That starts by loving our kin.

Pope Francis’ Multiculturalist Double Standard

I’m happy to say that Pope Francis does not teach such crackpot altruism as a universal theory. He doesn’t even condemn populism or nationalism per se. He sent a fulsome message of support to the recent Regional Gathering of Popular Movements. Its “Message from Modesto included a long list of claims that appeal to ethnic and economic self-interest.

In 2015, the pope actually addressed a meeting of such movements. That was during the trip when he accepted the “Communist crucifix” from the populist leader of Bolivia.

No, Pope Francis approves of nationalism, populism, and politics that promote one’s economic self-interest. There’s just one catch: Such movements are forbidden to European peoples. Also to members of the middle class. We are not allowed to advance our own interests, ever.

You’ll find no instance of Pope Francis warning Mexicans or Argentines against excesses of nationalism. He hasn’t called for Asian or Latin American countries to open their (fiercely guarded) borders. He doesn’t denounce the populists of Venezuela when they use the state to forcibly redistribute the wealth. (Venezuelan leftist populism is so disastrous that Catholics there can’t even get enough flour to make hosts for Holy Communion. No word from Pope Francis about that yet.)

Winking at Islamists and Socialists

No, it’s only when Europeans, or middle-class Americans, wish to look out for their own interests that Pope Francis feels the need to chastise. He seems to have internalized the ethical double standard of multiculturalism. One set of rules applies to the “privileged,” and another to the “underprivileged.” Only the upper classes are held to the higher standard.

But we’re supposed to wink at groupthink, rage, and the will to power when others indulge it. We’ll coddle it among Muslim immigrants, Bolivian Indians, or members of Black Lives Matter.

Of course, Pope Francis’ position is not an official teaching of the Catholic church. It’s not even a theological theory. It’s just a political bias. Good Catholics are perfectly free to point out that it is, to say the least, a double standard.