Reacting to Pope Francis speaking out against countries building walls to keep immigrants out, Fox Business Network host Elizabeth MacDonald sounded as if she were reading from a Trump tweet, deriding the pope for being “weak on the border wall.”
With Trump declaring a national emergency to secure funds to build a border wall and pledging to close America’s southern border this week if Mexico doesn’t stem the tide of asylum-seeking migrants, the pope said on Sunday that “those who build walls will become prisoners of the walls they put up.” In another speech this past weekend, Pope Francis asserted the “issue of migration will never be resolved by raising barriers.”
During Monday’s broadcast of Fox Business Network’s Varney and Co., host Stuart Varney highlighted the pontiff’s weekend remarks while noting the “pope’s getting political again.”
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MacDonald agreed that the pope was once again dipping his toe in political waters before claiming that many leaders in Latin America feel that Francis’ “message about social harmony” in countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua “falls flat” in those areas, contrasting this with his immigration remarks.
“So when you see the pope making statements about a border wall,” MacDonald said, “it has to be taken in the context of how the pope approaches all of Central America and South America.”
She added, “It's very weak in his response to communism and socialism in the other parts of the world. And he is weak on the border wall as well.”
As Varney and MacDonald noted, this isn’t the first time that Francis has commented on political matters, especially when it comes to Trump’s long-promised border wall. During the 2016 presidential election, Francis said it was “not Christian” for a person to think “only about building walls.”
Trump responded to that criticism by calling the pope’s remarks “disgraceful” and warning Francis of an impending ISIS attack, adding that “the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.”
