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Antichrist's Illegal Alien Assault on America, Parts 1 & 2

Steven T. Matthews

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“Your land, strangers devour it in your presence” (Isaiah 1:9).

“It’s a total free for all in Eagle Pass right now. Mass illegal crossing taking place for over an hour and a half.  Almost 2 years to the day we saw 15,000+ Haitians under the bridge in Del Rio, we now have thousands of predominantly Venezuelans gathering under Eagle Pass bridge.”

That was a recent post on X (formerly Twitter) from Fox News’ Bill Melugin, one of the few, perhaps the only, legacy media reporters who’s consistently covered the illegal alien disaster taking plan on America’s southwest border. A disaster, the proximate cause of which is the policies of the current presidential administration.

A New York Times article^[1]written the same day as Melugin’s post, September 20, 2023, reported that “Thousands of migrants crossed into the small city of Eagle Pass, Texas, from Mexico on Wednesday, crowding onto the bank of the Rio Grande and under an international bridge in what officials describe as an unfolding crisis.”

In a town hall on September 6, 2023,^[2] New York mayor Eric Adams caused quite a stir when he ripped the Biden Administration for providing “no support” to the city for the burgeoning illegal alien crisis and said, “This issue [the illegal alien crisis] will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.” Given the scale of the illegal alien crisis in his city, it’s hard to argue with Mayor Adams’ assessment. 

Many more such headlines can easily be found, but the three cited above are sufficient to give a sense of just how serious the illegal alien crisis in the United States has become as of September 2023. Rather than quote more headlines of mass border crossings, illegal aliens raping and murdering Americans, human trafficking, and cartel drug running – all of which are an outrage to any Christian – let’s ask this question, who is driving the treasonous immigration disaster on our southern border?

Reading only the headlines will never give you a sense of who’s driving America’s illegal alien disaster. Even digging down into the stories themselves will not get you to the bottom of it. This is true not only of reports from legacy media outlets but even of those from independent journalists. As an example of the latter, consider a recent video from popular YouTube news commentator Tim Pool. In a recent video,^[3] Pool talked about the ravages of the ongoing border crisis, saying, “What will make it [America] worse? Open borders where various random groups of people from a bunch of different countries come here to extract the resources, and that’s why you are seeing outrage in New York City.” Pool does a good job reporting on the magnitude of America’s border disaster, but he has nothing to say about the origin of the policy that is driving it. And make no mistake about it. The illegal alien assault on America’s southwest border is not, as some would have you believe, a natural phenomenon. Neither is it the result of “climate change” as some government officials and even Pope Francis have claimed.^[4] Rather, it is the result of a deliberate government policy.

All practice – and this includes the practice of flooding America with illegal aliens – is the practice of some prior theory. When it comes to the American illegal alien crisis, we need to seek the source of the ideas that have led to the flooding of our nation with millions of illegal aliens over just the past two and a half years. Once we have located the source of those ideas, we likewise will have found the source of the crisis.

And what is the source of the theory that is causing the illegal alien assault on America? The very first quotation above gives it away, although it may not be obvious on the surface. The source of the ideas driving America’s illegal alien disaster is the Roman Catholic Church-State.

Let’s go back and look at that first quotation from Bill Melugin.

It’s a total free for all in Eagle Pass right now. Mass illegal crossing taking place for over an hour and a half. Almost 2 years to the day we saw 15,000+ Haitians under the bridge in Del Rio, we now have thousands of predominantly Venezuelans gathering under Eagle Pass bridge.

I’d like to draw your attention to the third sentence in the quote where Melugin writes, “Almost 2 years to the day we saw 15,000+ Haitians under the bridge in Del Rio,^[5] now we have thousands of predominantly Venezuelans gather under Eagle Pass bridge.”

Interesting, isn’t it? Almost exactly two years apart, a similar event is taking place, the massing of huge numbers of migrants under a bridge on America’s southwest border. Is there a link between them? I think there is. It’s not stated in Bill Melugin’s post or in any other post or article that I have read either from the mainstream media or from the independent media. What is that link? It’s National Migration Week (NMW) and the World Day of Migrants and Refugees (WDMR), two annual events celebrated by the Roman Church-State every September. The mass border rush of the Haitians occurred at the time of the 2021 NMW and WDMR, and the current crush of illegal aliens from Venezuela is taking place during NMW and the WDMR in 2023.

Worth noting is that the United States is not the only nation experiencing a migrant surge in connection with the WDMR. The Italian Island of Lampedusa is experiencing what could reasonably be called an invasion, with CNN reporting that 7,000 “migrants” (their term) had arrived in a period of two days, and this on an island with a population of 6,000.^[6] Worth noting is that Pope Francis himself paid a visit to the island in 2013 and recently commemorated his visit with a letter to Archbishop Alessandro Damiano.^[7]

Now one would suppose that some reporter out there would draw a connection between NMW, the WDMR, and illegal alien surges on America’s southwest border. But in all the pieces that I have read – I do not claim to have read them all, but I do follow the immigration issue closely – I have yet to see one person draw that connection.

The Lord must give people eyes to see and ears to hear the truth or they will miss it. For over a hundred years now, the American Protestant church has been blinded to the present reality of the papal Antichrist and his evil deeds and thus fails to see his work, even as he sets about destroying their country right in front of their noses, or “in their presence” as the prophet Isaiah put it, via an illegal alien invasion of historic proportions.

There’s another possible reason for the failure of the American media to draw proper connections between immigration events such as the recent border surge and the policies and politics of the Roman Catholic Church: fear of criticizing Rome. It seems highly unlikely to this author, given Rome’s open and repeated encouragement of mass, illegal immigration, that the nation’s entire press corps is ignorant of the central role the Roman Church-State plays in this phenomenon. Yet there is nothing but thunderous silence from the press, both the legacy media and independent news organizations. Perhaps the people who run these organizations are more solicitous of being labeled “anticatholic” or offending supporters and advertisers than they are about speaking the truth concerning Rome and its seditious immigration activities.

In his book The Incarnation, Gordon Clark criticized the Council of Chalcedon for its failure to define the terms it used in the famous creed it produced. “Discard or define,” was Clark’s slogan.  John Robbins put the same thought this way, if you don’t define your terms, you don’t know what you’re talking about. So, in the spirit of Clark and Robbins, I’d like to take time to define the terms used in the title of this talk.

Antichrist

My definition of Antichrist is that which was accepted by nearly all Protestants before the 20^th century. Antichrist is the office of the papacy. The original language of the Westminster Confession of Faith summed up this view quite nicely in Chapter 25.6. It reads, “There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense be head thereof: but is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God.” But this language was altered in the 1903 revision of the Confession by the Presbyterian Church USA to remove the language identifying the pope as “Antichrist,” “man of sin,” and “son of perdition.” 

Two of the best Presbyterian theologians of the 20^th century did not offer much in the way of objection to the removal of this language from the Confession. Writing in the November 28, 1936 issue of the Presbyterian Guardian, J. Gresham Machen commented that the edition of the Confession adopted by the Presbyterian Church of America^[8] was the same as the doctrinal standards that existed in 1902, “except that two brief statements – one declaring the Pope to be Antichrist and the other declaring it to be sinful to refuse an oath when the civil magistrate requires it, are omitted.”^[9]

B.B. Warfield noted in his article “The Confession of Faith as Revised in 1903” that “The motive of the revisers seems to have been to avoid calling the Pope of Rome ‘that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God’ – which does seem rather strong language. Why the revisers wished to avoid applying these terms to the Pope of Rome we can only conjecture. But their avoidance of it need not imply that they – some or all of them – felt prepared to deny that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist of Scripture.”^[10] As do many Bible-believing Presbyterians, I count myself an admirer of B.B. Warfield, but these comments from him are disappointing. The most likely reason that the revisers excised the language identifying the Pope of Rome as Antichrist, man of sin, and son of perdition is the very one Warfield denies was their motive, that they – some or all of them – were prepared to deny that the Pope of Rome was the Antichrist of the Scriptures. The history of the American Presbyterian church since 1903 substantiates this reasoning, as even highly educated Presbyterians from that day to the present have become increasingly willing to deny that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist of the Scriptures, something that was once clearly understood even by the plowboy with a Bible.

But what the revisers did by striking the Confession’s language about the identity of Antichrist was something far worse than merely sowing confusion about who Antichrist is. By denying that the Pope of Rome is the Antichrist, the revisers of the Confession also denied the entire Protestant system of prophetic interpretation known as historicism, of which system the identity of Antichrist as the papacy is a key component.^[11]

It seems to this Presbyterian in the Year of Our Lord 2023 that the removal of the Confession’s language on the identity of Antichrist, while it may have appeared minor to observers at the time, opened the floodgates for the false Jesuit eschatologies of preterism and futurism - both of which deny a present Antichrist, instead placing him far in the past or at a time still to come – to come pouring into Protestant church, thus blinding, as it were, even the elect to the work of Antichrist taking place right in front of their noses.

One of these works, I argue in this paper, is the flooding of America with illegal aliens, many of them Roman Catholics, for the purpose of subverting our Protestant Republic, capturing the nation for Rome, and incorporating it into Rome’s planned system of world government.

Illegal Alien 

Those promoting mass, taxpayer-subsidized immigration like to criticize the use of the term “illegal alien,” the term used in the United States Code for those present in America contrary to American immigration law. “There’s no such thing as an illegal human being,” they like to say.

Nonsense. The evildoer is referred to by his evil deed in the English language. Someone who steals is a thief. A man who kills another contrary to the law is called a murderer. Those who bear false witness are called liars. Likewise, foreigners who are present in a country contrary to a nation’s immigration laws are illegal aliens. 

The “alien” in U.S. Code (USC) 8 “means any person not a citizen or national of the United States.^[12] There are different types of aliens. For example, a “resident alien” “is a foreign-born, non-U.S. citizen…who has been legally and lawfully recorded as a resident of the country. A resident alien must have a green card or pass a substantial presence test.”^[13] A green card allows the resident alien to legally work in the United States.

Likewise, there is another category of legal aliens known as “non-resident aliens.” “A nonresident alien is a noncitizen who ‘has not passed the Green Card test or the substantial presence test,’ according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)…Typical examples of nonresident aliens are teachers, people seeking medical treatment, and students.”^[14]

Unlike resident and non-resident aliens, illegal aliens are present in the U.S. contrary to U.S. law.  One definition of “illegal alien” is, “a foreigner who has entered or resides in a country unlawfully or without the country’s authorization.”^[15] The Cambridge Dictionary gives the following definition, “someone who lives or works in another country when they do not have the legal right to do so.”^[16]

A 1999 report by the U.S. Department of Justice used the term “illegal alien” “to refer to foreign-born persons who entered the United States without inspection by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or who entered legally as non-immigrants but remained after their authorized period of stay had expired.”^[17]

Assault

“Assault” is a common English word meaning, “to attack or fall upon by violence, or with a hostile intention.”^[18] By this definition, America has been under continuous assault by the papal Antichrist from before the nation formally declared its independence.^[19]  

It would likely come as a surprise to many 21^st century American Protestants that there was a large body of literature written by American Protestants throughout the 19^th century warning of the rise of Roman Catholicism in the United States and the threat it posed to American liberty. The warnings of these writers went largely unheeded and today are mostly forgotten. It is one of the great tragedies, perhaps the greatest tragedy, in American history that a Protestant republic tracing its roots back to the Puritans allowed itself to be usurped by the system of Antichrist, but this is what the historical record shows. The millions and millions of illegal aliens pouring across our southwest border in 2023 are a testament to the failure of American Protestants to resist the assault of Antichrist on the nation.

To give you a small flavor of the kind of warnings that were being sounded throughout the 19^th century by Christian writers solicitous of the liberties threatened by the rise of Antichrist on American soil, here are a few examples.

In his book Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, Samuel F. B. Morse – yes, that Samuel F. B. Morse, the one famous for the telegraph and Morse code – wrote, “That a vigorous and unexampled effort is making (sic) by the despotic governments of Europe to cause Popery to overspread this country, is a fact too palpable to be contradicted.”^[20]

R. W. Thompson, formerly Secretary of the U.S. Navy, wrote two books on the threat Romanism posed to the United States, The Footprints of the Jesuits and The Papacy and the Civil Power. In the latter, Thompson wrote, “It has seemed to me, for a long time, that it was the duty of the people of the United States to make themselves familiar with the history of the papacy, its relations to the civil power, and its attempted encroachments upon the rights of existing governments.”^[21]

Rum, Romanism, and rebellion. That’s a turn of phrase familiar to many Americans. But as was the case with this author for many years, it’s likely that many, if not most, people familiar with this saying have no idea what it refers to. It’s from a speech given by Presbyterian minister and Union Civil War veteran Dr. Samuel D. Burchard in 1884 in support of Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine. And what was Burchard referring to in his speech? The Democrats.  Here's the relevant quote in full. “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”^[22] While there are Roman Catholic influences in the Republican party, the Democrat party has been the principal channel Rome has used to infuse its destructive and unconstitutional political and economic philosophy into the mainstream of American thought and practice. It is no accident that both of America’s Roman Catholic Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Joseph R. Biden have been Democrats.^[23] That the current immigration disaster on our southwest border has been brought about by a Roman Catholic president is unsurprising. As we shall see later in this paper, the current administration’s immigration policy is simply the practice of the immigration theory of the Roman Church-State.

As further proof of Rome’s longstanding association with the Democrat party and the endemic corruption that has for so long been the hallmark of that institution, consider what Protestant minister Joseph Hartwell had to say in his 1887 book Romanism and Politics. Tammany Hall, the Stronghold of Rome. Wrote Hartwell,

TAMMANY HALL is simply the political organization of the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, with a Bishop Hughes or a Cardinal McCloskey or Archbishop Corrigan at its head and a Fernando Wood, a William Tweed, or a John Kelly for his fugleman [mouthpiece]. The proper name for it is JESUIT HALL. By this name it should be called, and by none other; for name and nature should correspond, so that when the one is called the other should be understood, and that would help to guide both the mind and the action of the American people.^[24]

During the American Civil War, Rome sided with the South. As John Robbins noted,

During the American Civil War, the pope favored the Confederate government, for they both favored slavery; they both opposed capitalism; and they both favored feudalism; that is, they were both medieval. The pope saw the war as a way to end the threat that America, a large, free, Protestant nation, posed to the political ambitions of Rome for world domination: divide and conquer.^[25]

The final quotation, and the one most apropos to this discussion comes from Charles Chiniquy, the French-Canadian Roman Catholic priest turned Presbyterian minister. Chiniquy wrote what is perhaps the best-known 19^th century book of all warning people about the dangers Rome posed to the religious, economic, and political liberties of the American people, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.  

In this book, there is a quote from an 1852 letter written by the Bishop of Chicago to Chiniquy while he was still a Catholic priest. Wrote Bishop Vandeveld, “Before you [Chiniquy] began your great work of directing the flood of Roman Catholic immigration towards this country [the United States] to secure it to our holy church, he [a priest named Courjeault] was in favour of that glorious scheme, but his jealousy against you has suddenly changed his mind” (emphasis added).^[26]

The practice of “directing the flood of Roman Catholic immigration towards this country to secure it for our holy church” is a Jesuit form of immigration warfare called irredentism.^[27] From Chinquy’s book, we know that Jesuit irredentism has been going on for at least 171 years, and most likely for much longer.

America 

By the term “America” I mean the United States of America.  As noted above, the papal Antichrist has had this nation in its crosshairs from very early in its existence, if not before it formally declared independence from Great Britain in 1776. When I refer to “Americans,” I am speaking about the citizens of the United States of America.

Now that we have established definitions of the key terms in this paper. Let us now turn to the principal theme of this talk, a discussion of Roman Catholic immigration theory as set forth in two major works, the 1952 apostolic constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana and the 2003 pastoral letter Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope issued jointly by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Mexican Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In his book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, John Robbins quoted Roman Catholic historian Brian Tierney's comment on Rome's doctrine of the of the two swords. This doctrine, which asserts that God had delegated both spiritual and temporal power to the bishop of Rome, is based on Luke 22:38 “And they said, Lord, behold here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.” Wrote Tierney, “A whole inverted pyramid of political fantasy was erected on the basis of this one verse.”^[28]

In much the same way as with the doctrine of the two swords, Rome likewise has erected a whole inverted pyramid of immigration fantasy on the basis of three verses in the second chapter of Matthew that record the flight into Egypt. 

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.”

When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, “Out of Egypt I called My Son.” (Matthew 2:13-15)

This flight, according to Pope Pius XII’s^[29] 1952 Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana,^[30] the Émigré Family of Nazareth, hereafter EFN, is the “archetype of every refugee family.”  In the words of Pius XII,

The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.^[31]

Clearly, Joseph and his family were refugees under any reasonable definition of the term. Had they remained in Bethlehem, it is certain that Jesus would have been executed by King Herod, who “sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men” (Matthew 2:16) in his attempt to kill the newborn King of the Jews. Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary gives the definition of refugee as, “one who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution.” According to the 1951 UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the term refugee applies to “any person who…owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”^[32] The definition of “refugee” in US law is essentially the same as that of the 1951 UN Convention. 

So far, so good. But EFN doesn’t stop there. It continues by asserting that the flight of Joseph and his family are “models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind”^[33] who is “compelled by fear of persecution or by want” to leave his native land. There are two principal problems here. First, there’s the unchristian notion that dead saints, in this case Joseph and Mary, can serve as protectors of the living. Second, Rome adds to the definition of refugee by including the category of those in want. The definitions of “refugee” quoted above said nothing about those in want. Neither the UN Convention nor US law recognizes economic refugees, but Rome does.  Joseph and his family were fleeing persecution, they were not fleeing want. As a result, there is no basis in the passage about the flight from Egypt for Rome to argue that the family’s flight serves as an “archetype” and “model…of every migrant, alien, and refugee of whatever kind.”

But this is not the extent of the problems with EFN. In EFN, Pius XII continues Rome’s longstanding attacks on both private property and the nation-state, two Biblical ideas recovered resulting from the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century.

Deeply concerning to everyone who loves political and economic liberty is Pius XII’s reliance on Rerum Novarum, PopeLeo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, as the basis for his immigration argument in EFN. Rerum Novarum is described in Ecclesiastical Megalomania as “One of the Roman Church-State’s most influential statements on economic matters.”^[34] What makes Rerum Novarum so dangerous, and Rome’s immigration theory that is built on it, is, as Robbins noted, the encyclical’s aggressive Marxism.

Noted Robbins, “The encyclical’s Marxism is so blatant that one Roman Catholic writer declared that ‘much of the encyclical…appeared only to repeat in more orthodox language what Marx had said ten years before.” 

Writes Pius XII

Then,—according to the teaching of “Rerum Novarum,” —the right of the family to a living space is recognized. When this happens, migration attains its natural scope as experience often shows. We mean, the more favorable distribution of men on the earth’s surface suitable to colonies of agricultural workers; that surface which God created and prepared for the use of all.^[35]

When Rome speaks about “the right of the family to a living space,” what they mean is that Western nations, including America, have an obligation to supply that living space. This is the basis for Rome’s many statements about the supposed obligation of the United States and other nations to take in economic migrants. And that obligation is not merely to take them in, but to supply them with the wherewithal to furnish that living space.

Pope Pius XII continues,

If the two parties, those who agree to leave their native land and those who agree to admit the newcomers, remain anxious to eliminate as far as possible all obstacles to the birth and growth of real confidence between the country of emigration and that of immigration, all those affected by such transference of people and places will profit by the transaction.^[36]

And yet the people of the United States have not agreed to admit the millions of illegal aliens surging across our southwest border.^[37] The current administration, abandoning its obligation to uphold American law, including American immigration law, has instead decided on a stand-down policy of non-enforcement while at the same time encouraging foreigners to violate American immigration law with promises of free housing, free medical care, and other benefits all paid for by American citizens by government force, either through direct taxation or inflation.^[38]  

The pope further asserts,

The families will receive a plot of ground which will be native for them in the true sense of the word; the thickly inhabited countries will be relieved and their people will acquire new friends in foreign countries; and the States which receive the emigrants will acquire industrious citizens. In this receive the migrants will acquire industrious citizens. In this way, the nations which give and those which receive will both contribute to the increased welfare of man and the progress of human culture.^[39]

Yet far from being the economic boon Rome claims, the masses of illegal aliens flooding America are a crushing tax burden on the American people. According to one source, “Annually, the 11 to 22 million aliens living in the U.S. cost American taxpayers $163 billion. That amount does not include any of the social and economic costs – such as higher housing prices, depleted wages, lost jobs, increased crime, and strained public resources at hospitals and schools.”^[40] This is hardly an example of “contribut[ing] to the increased welfare of man and the progress of human culture” as the pope claims. Rather, it represents the destruction of Protestant, western civilization by the papal Antichrist.

In EFN, Pius XII quotes an earlier letter written by him to the American bishops dated December 24, 1948. In this letter, Pius attacks not only private property. He wrote,

The natural law itself, no less than devotion to humanity, urges that ways of migration be opened to these people. For the Creator of the universe made all good things primarily for the good of all. Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.^[41]

Note that Pius draws special attention to the fact that “natural law” is the basis for what he calls “migration.” In Ecclesiastical Megalomania, John Robbins noted that in Thomistic, that is to say, Roman Catholic economic thought, “Private property is neither part of natural law, nor an absolute right, but an invention of human reason…Rather than private property being part of the natural law, the possession of all things in common is the natural law.”^[42] This natural law communism of the Roman Church-State is expressed by Pius in his words, “For the Creator of the universe made all good things primarily for the good of all.” Thomas called this original communism “the community of goods.” 

Neither Thomas nor Pius XII would argue that natural law forbids the private ownership of goods.  But they would argue that private property, not being part of natural law, but rather an invention of human reason, is rightfully subject to human regulation. 

According to Thomas, the moral imperative for the “community of goods” is need. As Thomas put it,

The division and appropriation of things which are based on human law do not preclude the fact that man’s needs have to be remedied by means of these very things. Hence, whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.^[43]

How does this idea relate to the millions of illegal aliens pouring across America’s border? Though he doesn’t say so directly, Pius XII believed that because individual illegal aliens have need, they have the right to take of the superabundance of the American people, and it is not a sin for them to do this.

In Roman Catholic social teaching, the notion that need is the only moral basis for ownership is called the universal destination of all goods. Writes Robbins,

The Thomistic notion of original communism – the denial that private property is part of the natural law, but that common property is both natural and divine – is foundational to all the Roman Catholic arguments for various forms of collectivism [including the sort of immigration socialism seen enacted on America’s south-western border on a daily basis], from medieval feudalism and guild socialism to twentieth century fascism and liberation theology. The popes refer to this original communism as the “universal destination of all goods.”^[44]

As then Bishop, now Cardinal, Robert McElroy of San Diego put it in a 2017 speech,

This stance of the church's teaching flows from teaching of the Book of Genesis, that creation is the gift of God to all of humanity. Thus, in the most fundamental way, there is a universal destination for all the material goods that exist in this world. Wealth is a common heritage, not at its core a right of lineage or of acquisition.^[45]

Once you begin to see the communist concept of the universal destination of all goods in Rome’s arguments for mass, taxpayer-subsidized immigration schemes, as the saying goes, you cannot unsee it. We shall revisit the universal destination of all goods when we look at Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope.

Not satisfied with merely attacking private property, Pius XII continued by assault on liberty by going after the institution designed to protect private property, the nation-state, and by implication tied the Vatican’s immigration policy to world government. As I noted in last year’s Reformation Day talk, Rome has always despised the idea of sovereign nation-states that are not subject to her control and constantly pushes for world government.^[46] As Pius XII put it,

Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this.^[47]

As is his father the Devil, the papal Antichrist is fond of speaking out of both sides of his mouth. In this case, he conceals his hatred for the nation-state by pretending to defend it, by claiming that there are limits to how far illegal aliens can go with their invading and devouring nations. They may do so, writes the pope, only as long as “the public wealth” (note, Pius does not say private wealth), is “considered very carefully.” I hope that makes you feel better about having your land devoured in your presence. We will be destroyed, but not past the point where Antichrist, after careful consideration, deems our “public wealth” to be at risk. How merciful of him! But don’t relax too much. One must “respect” “the sovereignty of the State,” but must not do so in an “exaggerated” manner. But who decides whether respect for “the sovereignty of the State” is “exaggerated” or not. Obviously, it must be a power superior to all nation-states, and that implies a world government. And given the papacy’s extraordinary pretensions to power – according to the Church-State, the pope of Rome is the “father of kings, governor of the world, and vicar of Christ” – it is the pope himself who will head that world government and decide whether America, or any other nation, has an “exaggerated” view of its “sovereignty.”

Put a bit differently, Rome will decide how many illegal aliens will invade America and how much wealth they will be allowed to steal from the American people. In Rome’s eyes, the only people who have no say in the matter are ordinary American citizens and their duly elected representatives.

While Pius XII chose to build his case for mass welfare migration on the flight of Joseph and his family to Egypt recorded in Matthew 2:13-15, this is not the only passage in Scripture on which to build a doctrine of immigration. One could argue that, in fact, it is not even the best passage of Scripture to cite for that purpose.

There are several important differences between the situation with Joseph’s family and the sort of mass border rush that’s taking place in America under the current presidential administration. One of these we’ve already mentioned: Joseph and his family were truly asylees according to the modern definition of the term, but many of those pouring across America’s southwest border are economic migrants.^[48] Certainly, one can sympathize with those seeking a better life, but their situation is not the same as those fleeing for their lives due to persecution.

But the problems with Pius XII’s argument don’t end there. One minor point worth noting is that both Judea and Egypt were constituent parts of the Roman Empire at the time of Christ’s birth. Fleeing from Judea to Egypt was simply going from one Roman province to another. Even Pius XII pretends to acknowledge that national borders matter, yet he builds his immigration case on an example where notional borders did not come into play.

A third problem with EFN’s argument is the makeup of the refugee population. In the flight to Egypt, it was a family that was fleeing persecution. Yet one of the consistent features of the flood of illegal aliens coming across America’s border is that the population is heavily skewed toward military-age men. There are also reports of large numbers of “Significant Interest Aliens” illegally crossing into the United States. A “Significant Interest Alien” is “a non-U.S. person who…poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests” and “Often…are employing travel patterns known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism.” In EFN Pius XII argued that “Jesus, Mary and Joseph…are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind.” Does this include terrorists? The answer, apparently, is yes. According to the current occupant of the seat of Antichrist, Pope Francis, migrants’ rights should override national security concerns.^[49]

Fourth, another problem with Pius XII’s argument based on Matthew 2 is that Joseph and his family returned home. The Roman Catholic Church-State does its level best to ensure that once illegal aliens get into America, they stay in America. There was a case in Cincinnati where an illegal alien woman from Mexico was arrested, spent the next ten years fighting deportation, lost her appeals, and was finally deported. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati engaged in a massive campaign to prevent her deportation,^[50] pushed to have her case reopened,^[51] and finally succeeded in having her brought back to the United States.^[52] You could call this Rome’s get ‘em in, put ‘em on the dole, keep ‘em in strategy.

To illustrate the absurd lengths that Rome will go to so that no alien, illegal or otherwise, is returned to his native land, consider Rome’s stance on the deportation of Salvadorans living in America as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients. TPS allows foreign nationals in the United States to live and work here as long as it is unsafe for them to return home. In the case of the 200,00 Salvadorans living in the U.S. as of 2019 under TPS, they were granted TPS in 2001 due to a pair of earthquakes that struck their country in, wait for it, 2001. A full eighteen years later, they were still living in the United States with TPA status! When it appeared that the government was getting serious about requiring that they return to El Salvador, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops got to work and issued a statement decrying the cruelty of the move.^[53] The government backed down. As of this writing, the Salvadorans are still under TPS status.^[54] One must ask the obvious question, if Salvadoran TPS recipients cannot be required to return home twenty-two years after an earthquake, when can they be? The twelfth of never seems to be the answer.

Fifth, the passage in Matthew 2 tells us nothing about how Joseph supported his family while in Egypt. Perhaps he worked as a carpenter while in exile. Maybe he was supported by members of the Jewish community in Egypt.^[55] Maybe the Lord provided for the family in some miraculous way or used some combination of these possibilities. But one thing is clear about the illegal aliens coming to America, they most certainly have a claim on the welfare state.^[56] Not only are the American people having their nation overrun by illegal aliens, but they get to pay for the privilege as well.

Sixth, there’s the issue of scale. In the passage from Matthew 2, there were a total of 3 people fleeing oppression. According to a report from FAIR, the illegal alien population in the United States as of June 2023 was approximately 16.8 million.^[57] According to the 2020 census, the population of Ohio is about 11.8 million, making it one of the largest states in the nation on a population basis. Yet the population of Ohio is dwarfed by the masses of illegal aliens in the country. The same report from FAIR puts the number of illegal aliens who have entered the United States during the current presidential administration at 2.3 million.

Clearly, there are problems with the Pope’s argument in EFN. Are there other passages of Scripture that could be used to help formulate a Christian view of immigration? 

Part 3 will conclude in the next Trinity Review.