Of Pontiffs and Poseurs

SteynonLine ^ | April 22, 2025 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

On Sunday Pope Francis publicly blessed the Easter crowds from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and privately received the Vice President of the United States to give Mr Vance's children a gift of Kinder Eggs. Yes, really: those Kinder Eggs. The following morning, the Holy Father died at his residence in the Vatican.

If the choice of Easter chocolate was a conscious jest on the part of the Pontiff, it was an excellent one, and a reminder that even in America chest-thumping about liberty will only take you so far. So I thank him for that. Other than his Kinderliness to JD's deprived moppets, on almost all the issues I care about - from free speech to the Falkland Islands, climate change to the Islamisation of Europe - His Holiness was on the other side, and mostly for shallow and meretricious reasons. Given the remorseless decay in the heart of Christendom during these years, his papacy has to be accounted a terrible failure at a time when the Church could least afford it.

~Pope Francis was entitled to his banal views on "open borders", even when expressed from behind the Trump-on-steroids walls of the Vatican. Whether the people are likewise entitled to elect leaders opposed to "open borders" is slightly more doubtful. And, even if you elect them on such a platform, will "democratic" societies permit them to enact it? Over the Easter weekend - in the dead of night - the US Supreme Court nevertheless found time to issue a cease-and-desist to "the government" on the deportation of any and all non-citizens currently being held in the Northern District of Texas "until further order of this court".

If, like many of the rube right, your principal interest in SCOTUS decisions is how the judge cards fall...