COMMENTARY As the first pope from Latin America, Francis will be lauded for urging compassion for the region's immigrants — but also questioned about how effectively he helped reduce their numbers.
If the late Pope Francis understood anything about America, it’s that due process is one of the principles that separates us from so many of the countries migrants come here to escape.
It’s why even undocumented migrants who commit heinous crimes on U.S. soil — like Victor Martinez Hernandez, a Salvadoran who was convicted last week in the brutal 2023 murder of a Maryland woman, Rachel Morin — get jury trials. It’s why Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant living legally in Maryland, should have had a court hearing before the Trump administration wrongly deported him to El Salvador last month.
It is, in short, one of the social justice codes that Francis, who died this week at 88, rightly reminded the U.S. and the world to practice when confronting the burgeoning ranks of immigrants fleeing dystopias like Venezuela or Haiti.
That will without a doubt be one of the highlights of his legacy as “the people’s pope.”
But Francis was also the first Latin American pope.
So it bears pointing out that during his 12-year-long papacy, those waves of migration from Latin America became larger and more desperate — culminating in a full-blown crisis at the U.S. southern border that only recently subsided.
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The reasons for that tsunami vary from repressive dictatorships to pandemic poverty, climate-change crises to criminal eruptions — the fact, for example, that 18 of the 25 cities with the world’s highest homicide rates are in Latin America and the Caribbean.
No individual, not even a pope, could have made those problems vanish in 12 years. Then again, many might argue the late St. Pope John Paul II of Poland needed only a dozen years to help bring down Europe’s Iron Curtain.
Either way, it raises a question about Francis’ legacy: what he did — and didn't do — to help improve his home continent's conditions while he was el Papa.
I’m glad Francis urged Americans to see the humanity of immigration. I wish he'd done more to help Latin Americans escape the necessity of immigration.
Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, should certainly be lauded for shining a pontifical spotlight on Latin America’s gaping economic inequality, often ranked the worst of any region in the world. Toward that end, he also gets a thumbs-up for decrying capitalism’s excesses — and setting an example with his refreshingly unpretentious lifestyle.
But for all his welcome papal progressivism on issues like labor rights and global warming — his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si is a historically heroic statement on both — I fear Francis will also be remembered for a certain liberal atavism, especially a failure to see how he might have more effectively helped Latin America's underdogs move into the 21st century economy instead of into migrant caravans.
Capitalist tools
Consider his, well, incomplete critique of capitalism.
The problem with capitalism in Latin America isn’t so much the free market, but rather the disgraceful reality that too few people can take part in it.
The region’s elitist, obstructionist economic structures make it urgent for institutions like the Roman Catholic Church that Francis led to step in and help the marginalized folks he championed secure the small business financing we take for granted in the developed world.
And yet, except perhaps briefly in Cuba, that kind of commercial constructiveness has rarely been part of the Catholic Church’s Latin America script — few liberation theologians sport MBAs — and it wasn’t really on Francis’ agenda, either.
Meanwhile, if you want to know why the Catholic share of Latin America’s population plummeted from 70% at the start of Francis’ papacy in 2013 to 54% today — despite his seven visits to the region — look at how zealously Evangelical churches there get congregants things like micro-loans, entrepreneur prep and tech training.
Access to those capitalist tools makes it a lot less likely a Honduran slum dweller will turn to gang membership, or leave for the U.S., to feel socio-economically whole.
Francis also turned out to be Latin American retro with his clueless handling of the clerical sexual abuse scandals that traumatized countries like Chile and Argentina.
And just as big a blind spot was his indulgent soft spot for the leftist regimes, especially in Cuba and Venezuela, whose repression and incompetence have driven so many to emigrate.
I’m glad Francis urged Americans to see the humanity of immigration.
I just wish he’d done more to help Latin Americans escape the necessity of immigration.
