Oops, he did it again. Pope Francis, who, throughout his papacy, has done a lot more political “activating” than “poping,” declared during a Good Friday interview that the West is guilty of widespread “racism,” while also claiming migrants are “subdivided” by skin color and country of origin. And that’s just for starters.

During the lengthy interview on Italian television, as noted by Breitbart: “We are racists, we are racists.”

There’s first-class, second-class, skin color, [whether] they come from a developed country [or] one that is not developed.

We are racists, we are racists. And this is bad.

The problem of the refugees is a problem that Jesus suffered too because he was a migrant and a refugee in Egypt when he was a child, to escape death. How many of them are suffering to escape death!

I will neither comment on the pope’s religious analogies nor criticize his beliefs; I will instead report the facts and allow the reader to come to his or her own conclusions.

Francis went on to praise a painting of the flight into Egypt of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus when word spread that King Herod was seeking to kill Jesus. The painting, by an Italian artist, depicts Joseph as a clean-shaven, modern-day Syrian and his child fleeing the ongoing civil war.

An anguished face that these people have, just like Jesus, forced to flee. He sent it to me and I made holy cards from it.

As noted by Breitbart, the Pope is (was) scheduled to preside over the Stations of the Cross in Rome’s Colosseum. For the fourteenth and final station, a family of migrants was invited to write and present a reflection on the placing of Christ’s body in the tomb after his crucifixion. The text reads, in part:

Now we are here. We have died to our past. We wanted to live in our own land but war prevented that. It is difficult for a family to have to choose between its dreams and its freedom, between its hopes and survival.

We are here, after travels in which we witnessed the death of women and children, friends, brothers, and sisters. We are here, the survivors. We are perceived as a burden.

At home, we were important, but here we are numbers, categories, and statistics. And yet we are much more than just migrants. We are persons.

Francis is right — in a general moral sense. That said, given his position on illegal immigration to America, do or should his observations apply to conservative opposition to the Biden’s open-border policy? Are we “bad racists” for fighting against unlimited numbers of illegal aliens gleefully crossing our southern border at will, and subsequently being shipped across America?

This latest foray into hot-button sensitive issues with political ramifications was hardly Francis’s first.

Francis in 2019 declared that “ecological sin” should be introduced to “the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” In 2018, Francis faced demands for his resignation after the sex abuse scandal that led to the resignation of disgraced former cardinal Archbishop Theodor McCarrick. And in 2015 during remarks at the Obama White House, Francis was all-in on the “existential threat of mankind” climate change hysteria.

The list goes on.

So the question remains. Should a pope do less politicking and stick to poping? Given I’m a non-Catholic, permit me to end with a question that may sound woefully uninformed to the Catholic faithful: Does Pope Francis get out of his lane when he weighs in on hot political issues? Should he “stick to poping” or does poping require him to speak out on controversial issue after controversial issue?

My only point of reference is the behavior of previous popes, notably John Paul II, the most charismatic pope of the modern area. From my perspective, at least, JP2 poped a whole lot more than he politicked.

Anyway, let me know what you think.