Months before officials in New York City allowed migrants to displace students in public schools, or officials in Chicago turned O’Hare International Airport into a refugee center, the former general counsel for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services made a frightening prediction about illegal immigration.

“This is going to be a catastrophe for our health-care system, our criminal justice system, our educational system,” Elizabeth Yore said in December. “We’re not going to recognize our society in two years. The crime and the chaos in the schools is going to be unimaginable. We are going to be paying for this for decades, generations.”

The fact that Yore, a conservative Catholic, made that criticism holds more than casual significance — especially since the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops effectively supports open borders.

As FrontPage Magazine twice reported, the USCCB uses taxpayer dollars to fund its human trafficking campaign, thereby enriching that body. But the payment it exacts for exploiting poor Latin American migrants exceeds the monetary.

The bishops use immigration as a weapon to implement Pope Francis’ globalist vision, which demands the eradication of national identity and legitimate national self-interest. That explains the bishops’ vehement opposition to President Donald Trump and their failure to forge a united front against Joe Biden, one of Francis’ favorites.

It also explains the bishops’ breathtaking silence on such crimes as child trafficking, sex trafficking and drug trafficking, and the prelates’ refusal to defend innocent Americans of all ethnicities against crimes perpetrated by illegal immigrants — including murder, as the “Angel Families” can attest.

Finally, it explains the bishops’ opposition to controlling illegal immigration through such means as “a tripling of Border Patrol agents, especially at ports of entry, and the use of sophisticated technology such as ground sensors, surveillance cameras, heat-detecting scopes, and reinforced fencing,” as a joint pastoral letter from American and Mexican bishops stated in 2003.

“That such measures might, in fact, deter or detect individuals trafficking children, the bishops ignored,” Marjorie Murphy Campbell, a Catholic lawyer, wrote for The Christian Review, a website founded by the former publisher of a conservative Catholic magazine, Crisis.

But Francis is no outlier. His globalist agenda reflects six decades of papal policy, as FrontPage Magazine often reported. Starting with the Second Vatican Council, which lasted from 1962-65, Catholic leaders began advocating radically egalitarian and utopian solutions to besetting world problems. Implementing those solutions demanded globalist reorganization, preferably under one supranational body that would hold nations accountable.

Encyclicals from Popes John XXIII, Paul VI and Benedict XVI refined that policy. In 1963, John, who convened the council, used his encyclical Pacem in Terris to advocate creating an international “public authority with power, organization and means” that operates in “a world-wide sphere of activity” to devise and impose policy, he wrote. “Consequently, the moral order itself demands the establishment of some such general form of public authority.”

In 1967, Pope Paul VI reinforced that appeal in his encyclical, Populorum Progressio.

“Such international collaboration among the nations of the world certainly calls for institutions that will promote, coordinate and direct it, until a new juridical order is firmly established and fully ratified,” Paul wrote before quoting his own address to the United Nations. “’Who can fail to see the need and importance of thus gradually coming to the establishment of a world authority capable of taking effective action on the juridical and political planes?’”

In 2009, Benedict offered the most detailed approach, as FrontPage reported upon his death. In Caritas in Veritate, he advocated replacing the UN with “a true world political authority” to secure “the common good” by regulating national economies, diplomacy and international law. It would have power “to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties,” he wrote, “so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.”

Such an agency, Benedict continued, would “manage the global economy to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration.” Protecting the environment would involve “a worldwide redistribution of energy resources.” (Emphasis added)

Francis built on that foundation with two encyclicals of his own: Laudato Si on environmental sustainability and Fratelli Tutti on economic redistribution. In 2019, Francis expressed the papal commitment to globalism when the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences met:

“The nation-state cannot be considered as an absolute. In the current situation of globalization, the nation-state is no longer able to procure on its own the common good of its populations. The common good has become global and nations must affiliate themselves for their own benefit. When a supranatural common good is clearly identified, it necessitates a specific, legally and concordantly constituted authority capable of facilitating its fulfillment.” (Emphasis added)

In March 2021, during an interview to promote his book, God and the World to Come, Francis said that a “new world order” must emerge from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic:

“Let us all keep in mind that there is something worse than this crisis: the drama of wasting it. Instead, we can heal injustice by building a new world order based on solidarity, studying innovative methods to eradicate bullying, poverty and corruption, all working together, each for their own part, without delegating and passing the buck.” (Emphasis added)

That November, Francis reiterated that call to the Paris Peace Forum:

“Faced with the consequences of the great storm that has shaken the world, our conscience therefore calls us … not to follow the easy path of returning to a ‘normality’ marked by injustice, but to accept the challenge of assuming the crisis as ‘a concrete opportunity for conversion, transformation, to rethink our lifestyle and our economic and social systems.’ “

Unfettered immigration serves the globalist agenda by eroding national law, identity and culture. Europe provides the prime example. Francis encourages millions of Middle Eastern Muslims to migrate there, regardless of problems concerning assimilation, yet never encourages them to become Christians.

As Francis’ apostolic representatives in the United States, the bishops engage in two tactics to promote his interests.

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez represents the velvet glove. Gomez, born in Mexico, addressed the Catholic Napa Institute in 2011, the year he became archbishop, on immigration’s role in American culture.

After acknowledging and praising the pivotal role Calvinist immigrants to New England and the Founding Fathers played in forging the nation’s identity, Gomez directed attention to Spanish colonization in Florida and California.

“It is the story not of colonial settlement and political and economic opportunity,” Gomez said. “It is the story of exploration and evangelization. This story is not Anglo-Protestant but Hispanic-Catholic. It is centered, not in New England but in Nueva España — New Spain — at opposite corners of the continent.”

By forgetting “our country’s roots in the Hispanic-Catholic mission to the new world,” Gomez continued, “we end up with an idea that Americans are descended from only white Europeans and that our culture is based only on the individualism, work ethic and rule of law that we inherited from our Anglo-Protestant forebears.”

Gomez then disregards the rule of law by ignoring the illegal status of many immigrants and focusing on their potential.

“These immigrants — no matter how they came here — are people of energy and aspiration,” he said. “This is why I believe our immigrant brothers and sisters are the key to American renewal. And we all know that America is in need of renewal — economic and political, but also spiritual, moral and cultural renewal. I believe these men and women who are coming to this country will bring a new, youthful entrepreneurial spirit of hard work to our economy. I also believe they will help renew the soul of America.” (Emphasis added)

Catholics, of course, have their own pivotal role to play.

“Catholics need to lead our country to a new spirit of empathy,” Gomez said. “We need to help our brothers and sisters to start seeing the strangers among us for who they truly are — and not according to political or ideological categories or definitions rooted in our own fears.”

The second tactic is the iron fist, which San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy represents. In 2017, while still a bishop, McElroy encouraged his audience to act as “disruptors” by encouraging disobedience to immigration law.

“We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families,” he said. “We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies, rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need.”

McElroy’s inflammatory rhetoric not only imitates the “resistance” narrative Trump’s enemies embraced. It silently equates American immigration authorities to Gestapo agents seeking Jews.

In August 2022, McElroy received his reward when Francis made him a cardinal.

But rhetoric means nothing without action. As FrontPage reported, an investigation from the Heritage Foundation discovered that Catholic Charities linked almost 3,400 separate mobile phones to anonymous contacts in 433 of the nation’s 435 Congressional districts. The investigation also traced 22,000 cell phones from all NGOs to 431 districts.

“Of the 52 congressional districts with the highest density of devices,” the foundation reported, “71 percent were Republican congressional districts.”

By supporting and profiting from illegal immigration, the bishops not only have declared war against their countrymen. By trying to implement Francis’ agenda, the bishops essentially act as agents of a hostile foreign government.

Maureen Mullarkey, a conservative Catholic commentator, powerfully summarized the significance of their position.

“By admonishing voters to ‘humanize globalization,’ the bishops position themselves in the vanguard of a globalist world freed from competing national aims and interests,” she wrote. “To a clerical elite impatient for the withering away of the national state, an open border is the staging ground for assault on citizenship and national sovereignty.”

Not for nothing does Mullarkey call the USCCB “a fifth column in cope and chasuble.”