“Communication should be at the service of an authentic culture of encounter.” Pope Francis said, World Communications Day, 2014. For those of us in the news business, this stands as the late beloved Pope Francis’ affirmation of and challenge to our work.

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Pope Francis wrote last year. It was in direct and forceful contrast to President Trump’s and Vice President Vance’s vapid sophistry justifying their mass deportation policy.

Pope Francis took on Vance’s wildly false claims about the Catholic Church’s historical   teaching, dating to St. Augustine, of “Ordo Amoris” (on the proper hierarchy of love). Vance claimed it means the self (and immediate family) coming first, and strangers last.

The ever compassionate, ever combative Pope, shortly after learning of Vance’s duplicitous interpretation, countered, “The true ‘Ordo Amoris’ that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” He prefaced that by affirming the “equal dignity of every human being,” almost the direct opposite of what Vance had contended.

However, quite in keeping with his life’s mission and work, this Pope, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, himself the son of struggling migrants, being far more a pastor, or shepherd, than ideologue, would not in the final hours of his life turn his back even on Vance, this recent adult convert to Catholicism, granting him a very brief audience on Easter Sunday. It came just prior to his stepping out on the balcony and delivering an Easter blessing to everyone and a run around the grounds amid a mass of humanity, in his classic Popemobile.

Amazing the world by surviving a grave illness in what seemed his final hours while in a hospital for months, Pope Francis had come home where he could deliver final gestures of holy servitude on Easter before passing in the next few hours, culminating his 13 years as Pontiff. He was 88.

Contrast Pope Francis’ passion lifting up the downtrodden, those least able to fend for themselves, to Trump’s Easter message:

“Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country…He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected.”

One leads by love, the other by hate. It’s that simple.

Pope Francis was not fooled for a minute by what passed for the form of “American conservative Catholicism” with which Vance had became aligned in 2019.

Its roots lie in the dark right-wing cult of the church known as the Opus Dei, which is exposed in author Gareth Gore’s comprehensive new book, “Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024).

“At the heart of the organization,” Gore writes, “lies an elite…group (that) lives according to a dystopian set of rules and regulations – an Orwellian blueprint for society…where almost every move is meticulously prescribed and watched over, where contact with friends and family is restricted and monitored…Living in closed, segregated communities, they operate as clandestine cells in almost every major city in the world.” He says the largest group is in the Washington, D.C. area.

He writes that in 2022, Pope Francis “made his first attempt to rein in the organization…downgrading the institution within the hierarchy of the church.” Also aligned with this cult are Leonard Leo of the powerful Federalist Society and Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito.