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Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.
With your complaining about the Evil Catholics on the court, I can not help but notice that all of them except for Sotomayor were appointed by Republican presidents. In particular, two of the three you identify as strongly Catholic (ACB and Kavanaugh) were appointed by President Trump. Perhaps ask him why he did not appoint some gun enthusiast evangelicals which favor rounding up the illegals and sending them to megaprisons in some shithole nation, or blow up their ships before they arrive?
To get the obvious out of the way: the SCOTUS upholding birthright citizenship is not that surprising that we need conspiracy explanations. The plain language of the 14th, plus a century and change worth of legal precedent based on a textual interpretation of the 14th is not something you overturn easily. In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe. We do not need to suppose that the conservatives who voted for birthright citizenship are stooges of the pope when the alternative explanation is that they are textualists who are reluctant to say "actually the constitution means X when it says Y because it would be really convenient for the object level decision if it did."
Also, if you think that the Vatican would excommunicate anyone over being against open borders, think again. Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic.
I am also sorry to inform you that some brands of Christianity do not make good foundations on which you can project arbitrary political messages. Christianity comes with its own ideas about what is good. Caring for the plight of the needy was very much instrumental in early Christianity spreading. There were certainly papacies where this message was lost almost completely, but a general attitude of "let the third worlders drown, who gives a fuck" is not compatible with Catholicism. (In better news, there are plenty of choices for religions which are long on not giving a fuck about others. Vance, Hegseth and his ilk might be better off worshipping Huitzilopochtli, Odin or Khorne.)
Also, do you have some source for the Vatican (or even Mamdani) arguing that the best way to fix global poverty is just to open all the borders? Personally, I do not believe that open borders scale very well. Supporting the needy in a First World country seems much less effective than supporting them directly in the global South. Rescuing drowning migrants is, in my mind, not a part of a coherent plan to tackle global poverty. Instead, it is something you do because it is the thing a decent human should do, and you realize that you do not have the stomach to crucify enough migrants to deter them from coming, and do not trust any (hypothetical) utilitarian argument that this would lead to better global outcomes.
There are cardinals in the Catholic Church right now calling for stricter migration laws into the west. This is very much not an off limits thing.
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The Parable of the Good Samaritan is about how to treat schismatics, if anything, not about how to treat the strictly foreign and alien. The take away from this parable would be: “maintain neighborly love for a group like the SSPX”. The Samaritans were Israelites, existing within the borders of Israel, of the same blood and history as Jews, with scriptural and ritual overlap but large departures in orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The Jews were able to engage in some rituals with them, according to the Talmud, but otherwise they were treated as a heretical group. For an example of Catholics attempting to practice the meaning being this parable, see how they responded to yesterday’s excommunication of the SSPX. You will find a lot of malice and spite. Yet the SSPX is 99x more similar to the Vatican than the Samaritans to the ancient Jews.
The samaritans were heretics. Thé SSPX is schismatic(getting excommunicated for heresy would require something like denying the divinity of Christ) at the moment, but they weren’t for the better part of two decades ending on, literally, this Tuesday.
It is worth noting that their specific crime, electing bishops vagrans, is collapsed into a general crime of ‘consecrating bishops without mandate from the pope’ under the current code of canon law, but would be viewed as very bad behavior in the other apostolic churches as well, even if ‘schism’ isn’t really the right term for it(although as a legal category, thats where it goes).
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And what did she end up doing?
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Fear not, heretic, once the Great Day of Total Domination comes and the Pope is both secular and spiritual head of the entire world (as is only right and proper), we will remember those who aided us and your cell in the dungeons will have a tiny slit to permit some cloudy natural daylight enter, and you will only be tortured by the Inquisition once a month!
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I mean, that's not really what "legislation from the bench" means? Take, for example, Kavanaugh's position that 14A doesn't require it either way, but Congress can legislate either way, wouldn't really be "legislation from the bench". It would instead be giving room for legislation. Typically, "legislation from the bench" means that the Court rules in a way that precludes legislation from making the decision. Somewhat ironically, that's kind of what the Court actually did here. By analog, Roe was legislation from the bench, where the Court decided the question in a way that didn't allow for any legislative choice, whereas Dobbs is probably not legislation from the bench, as it's saying that the legislation rests with the legislatures.
Of course, just because something is "legislation from the bench" doesn't mean that it's wrong; the Constitution may really, actually, say the thing.
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