In his first in-depth interview with a United States broadcast network, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church talked about a wide range of topics, including anti-Semitism, climate change, homosexuality, the wars in Israel and Ukraine, and U.S. immigration policy. On May 19, a portion of this interview between Pope Francis and Norah O’Donnell aired on cbs’s 60 Minutes. As is his custom, Pope Francis spoke in a loose and informal style, yet he still gave direct and unambiguous answers to O’Donnell’s questions.

The pontiff reiterated that women could not be ordained deacons, that surrogate motherhood is morally impermissible, that homosexual unions should not be blessed, that he would not resign as pope. And he reiterated that migrants should be welcomed into the United States.

Francis condemned Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s efforts to subpoena a Catholic charity that offers housing to illegal immigrants. “That is madness,” the pope claimed. “Sheer madness. To close the border and leave them there. That is madness. The migrant has to be received.”

In February, Paxton accused Annunciation House of “alien harboring, human smuggling and operating a stash house.” Pope Francis is not taking any of this criticism to heart; rather, he is doubling down on dogmatic statements like “Migration is something that makes a country grow” and “The migrant has to be received.”

This sentiment brings the pope into opposition with the majority of Americans who back building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. The number of illegal aliens in the U.S. has doubled under Biden, so most Americans feel that the government needs to start enforcing immigration laws already on the books instead of forking over money to Catholic charities dedicated to making it easier for aliens to illegally cross the border.

The New York Post reported on July 22, 2022, that Democrats were using charities like Annunciation House to hide how much money is going to illegal immigrants. Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey wrote:

Even before crossing the border, migrants still in Mexico are being handed debit cards loaded with $800 a month to enable them to pay for necessities. “The gift cards are distributed by the nonprofit Organization for Migration, thanks to money provided by the U.S. State Department. After crossing and surrendering to U.S. Border agents, many migrants are directed to Catholic Charities, which provides them with hotel rooms, meals and clothing, and sometimes pays for their bus or plane tickets to their chosen destinations.

Of course, Catholic Charities and other nongovernmental organizations can argue that such activity is legal because it has government approval. But that does not change the fact that the migrants being bused to Catholic Charities are undocumented.

According to the Capital Research Center, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the nation’s largest network of nonprofit immigration activist programs, started announcing the receipt of grants from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to their affiliates in September 2022. These grants were supposed to help “expand [the network’s] range of services for our low-income immigrant clients on their path to citizenship.” Yet using taxpayer dollars to help illegal immigrants fight deportation strikes many as unfair since citizens are not offered commensurate legal services.

McCaughey noted in her New York Post article, “Democratic politicians want to maximize illegal immigration, but they don’t want their fingerprints on it. The remedy: Pay so-called charities that will do the work for them.” Not all of these charities are Catholic, of course, but the largest network is, as well as many others.

Pope Francis is very supportive of such activity, which makes sense as San Diego bishop Robert McElroy noted in 2016 that mass deportations of illegal aliens could remove 10 percent of parishioners from U.S. churches.

About 62 million people identify as Catholic in the U.S., roughly 23 percent of the population. But for every convert, six Catholics leave the church. About half give up on religion, while the other half join a Protestant denomination. The reason the percentage of Catholics in the U.S. isn’t falling is native-born Catholics are being replaced by foreign-born ones. Without illegal immigration, the Catholic Church in the U.S. would be a shrinking organization of diminishing influence. Immigrants give Catholic leaders influence they would not otherwise have. According to the Vienna Institute of Demography, if immigration into America doubled, Catholicism would overtake Protestantism to become the largest religion by the middle of the century.

The late Herbert W. Armstrong taught that the alliance between Europe and Latin America would grow extremely strong due to the Catholic domination of both continents. In the book of Revelation, the Apostle John saw a vision of a beast that would make war in the end time. He tells us how to identify this beast with the following riddle: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six” (Revelation 13:18).

Many are familiar with Roman numerals, where i is 1, v is 5, x is 10, etc. But few know that the Greek and Hebrew alphabets also use letters for numbers. The Apostle John wrote the book of Revelation in Greek, and the early Christian bishop Irenaeus noted in his book Against Heresies (a.d. 198) that the letters in the Greek name Lateinos (ΛΑΤΕΙΝΟΣ) sum out to 666. The last of the four kingdoms seen by the Prophet Daniel was the Latin kingdom. Lateinos founded the kingdom of Latium, which grew into the ancient Roman Empire, transformed into the medieval Holy Roman Empire, and spread across the Atlantic Ocean into modern Latin America.

Francis is saying it is an act of charity to let millions of unvetted immigrants pour into America. Yet the truth is that the immigration crisis is the beginning of a prophesied invasion of the United States. Pointing to Bible prophecy, Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1956 that barely a third of Americans would survive this time of besiegement and invasion (Ezekiel 5:1-2). Then he explained what would happen to that remaining third: “And that surviving third will be uprooted from their homes—transported like cattle as slaves to Europe, and probably some to South America (the Germans are fast gaining dominance and control in South America).”

To learn more about the Vatican’s involvement on the U.S. southern border, read “Why Is the Pope Meddling in American Politics?” and “America Is Being Besieged Economically,” by Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry.