Leo XIV’s sermon on Pentecost Sunday took its keynote from Benedict XVI. On Pentecost, 2005, Benedict proclaimed: “The Spirit opens borders… She [the Church] must open the borders between peoples and break down the barriers between class and race. In her, there cannot be those who are neglected or disdained.”
Benedict was not the first pope to oblige globalism by doing theology with one eye on geopolitics. Massive problems have followed that trajectory. Some are on view right now in the streets of Los Angeles. But you are watching and reading about them elsewhere. Let me stay with our current bard of the universal Social Gospel preached as the word of God.
In his sermon on Pentecost Sunday, Leo XIV repeated the word “borders” some eleven times. Incremental repetition is a rhetorical device to enhance mood. It lends accumulated weight to a desired emotional effect. A balladeer’s technique, it signals Leo’s conception of his role as the anointed rhapsodist of faith and worship in service to utopian political and economic ends. The open borders chorale views the West—America in particular—as a global welfare program for failed states. Leo’s messianic pretension carries over from his uneven predecessor. It comes fluently, delivered in phrasing composed for ears susceptible to mellifluous sanctimony.
Leo’s sermon began on a high note: “The Spirit opens borders, first of all, in our hearts.” It dropped quickly into a chastisement that obliquely stigmatized its listeners:
His presence breaks down our hardness of heart, our narrowness of mind, our selfishness, the fears that enchain us and the narcissism that makes us think only of ourselves. The Holy Spirit comes to challenge us, to make us confront the possibility that our lives are shrivelling up, trapped in the vortex of individualism.
Ah, yes, that whirling vortex called daily living. Leo’s word “us” incorporates ordinary individuals who struggle to pay their bills and manage debt, who juggle jobs, marital issues, and children’s well-being while they cope with a family member’s illness, disability, or death. Viewed from a Third-Worldist’s choir loft, these are the narcissists who chafe under a diktat to welcome all comers to our country without demanding even legality of them. Anyone who expects aliens to enter our country the way our own parents and grandparents did—by standing in queue and following lawful protocols—is a mark of our “rigidity,” our “hardness of heart and narrowness of mind.”
Let the designated “marginalized and excluded”—enshrined in Leo’s May 10th talk to the College of Cardinals— step forward to claim benefits. Leave the undesignated marginalized (e.g., homeless Veterans, our own working poor, or laid off workers in energy and manufacturing) to content themselves with the “joy of fraternity.”
Leo discerns the Spirit “opening borders in our relationship with others,” and “broadening the borders of our relationships.” Needless to say, the Spirit blesses “open borders between peoples.” Let our lives “become places of welcome and refreshment.” Those we welcome have no obligation to reciprocate. Flying their own national flag, they need not treat us as theirneighbors. Our welcome must a pure oblation.
Spend a moment to read the full sermon. It is not long. Just long enough to reveal a degree of moral vanity at the core of this new pontificate.
Read the rest: https://studiomatters.com/pope-leo-pentecost-spirit-of-open-borders
