ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) – Asked about Donald Trump’s views on immigration, Pope Francis says anyone who wants to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border isn’t Christian.
Trump has promised to build a wall along the Mexican border from Texas to California and expel 11 million people who are in the country illegally if elected president. The Pope’s comments en route home from Mexico came hours after he prayed at the Mexico-U.S. border for migrants who died trying to reach the United States.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said. “This is not in the Gospel.”
Not having heard Trump’s border plans independently, Francis said he’d “give him the benefit of the doubt.” But he added “I’d just say that this man is not Christian if he said it this way.”
Pope Francis also has suggested that women threatened with the Zika virus could use artificial contraception but not abort their fetus, saying there’s a clear moral difference between aborting a fetus and preventing a pregnancy.
Francis was asked Wednesday en route home from Mexico if abortion or birth control could be considered a “lesser evil,” when faced with the Zika-linked cases of rare birth defects such those faced in Brazil, where babies have been born with abnormally small heads.
The explosion of Zika cases has prompted some governments in Latin America to urge women to avoid getting pregnant and has fueled calls from abortion rights groups to loosen the strict anti-abortion laws in the overwhelmingly Catholic region.
Francis excluded abortion absolutely from the debate.