New Delhi, Feb. 26 -- Just days before Pope Francis was hospitalized with pneumonia in the middle of this month, he criticized the Trump administration's mass deportation of immigrants in blunt terms. In a letter to Catholic bishops in the US, the Pope said that it violated "the dignity of many men and women" and that such policies "begin badly and will end badly."

The contrast between the Pope's candour and the mostly muted response from European leaders to US Vice-President J.D. Vance's provocative 14 February speech in Munich could not have been clearer. Vance said, somewhat incredibly, that he worried more about the state of European democracies than he did about possible threats to Europe from China and Russia.

In his letter on imm...