The Pope’s moment

On Tuesday, Pope Francis set foot in the United States for the first time in his life. His plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where American presidents depart and arrive on Air Force One. But, according to a Spanish journalist on the papal plane, this was not how Francis had wanted to arrive. He would have preferred to cross over from Tijuana, the grubby Mexican city menaced by drug gangs from which countless migrants slip across the border into California. In other words, if the report is true, the Pope wished to turn his arrival into a political gesture, aligning himself with America’s 11.3 million ‘undocumented’ immigrants and, implicitly but unmistakably, against the 77 per cent of US citizens who regard illegal immigration as a ‘serious problem’.

Such a stunt would have played badly with the American public. But it would have been portrayed sympathetically by the country’s liberal media, and greeted jubilantly abroad.