Pope Leo, the first American pontiff, used a speech celebrating America's 250th birthday to lecture U.S. citizens on welcoming immigrants — delivering the rebuke from a 109-acre walled city-state with some of the strictest border controls on the planet.

The stake is straightforward: a foreign head of state with zero democratic accountability to Americans is using his religious authority to pressure U.S. sovereignty and immigration policy, while his own enclave lets virtually nobody in.

In an address broadcast from the Vatican to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where he received the Liberty Medal, Leo said the word "America" had become a "byword for freedom" across the world because of the way the country welcomed migrants, according to The Guardian. He urged Americans to "remain ever true to the dream that has earned it the title of land of the free and home of the brave."

The timing was no accident. Leo will mark July 4 by visiting Lampedusa, the Italian island that serves as a primary entry point for migrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa. Dutch Vatican correspondent Andrea Vreede told The Guardian the date was deliberate: "The pope is telling Trump what is important to him, and that is migrants. He chose 4 July to make this point." Vatican journalist Marco Politi was blunter, calling the trip "a political message against the persecution of immigrants and what is being done by ICE agents in the US."

What neither The Guardian's world desk nor its U.S. desk saw fit to report: the Vatican's own immigration policy. The city-state, encircled by medieval walls and guarded by the Swiss Guard, grants citizenship to a few hundred people — almost exclusively clergy and diplomats. Asylum claims are virtually nonexistent. Entry is tightly controlled. The Vatican enforces border restrictions stricter than anything Donald Trump has ever proposed. The Guardian framed Leo's remarks as an "implicit rebuke to Trump" but buried the glaring hypocrisy of a walled sovereign lecturing a democratic nation about open doors.

Vice President JD Vance pushed back, calling the Vatican's views on immigration "troubling" during a Vatican meeting in May. Leo has still not accepted Trump's invitation to visit the White House. Relations deteriorated further after the pontiff condemned the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

The broader picture The Guardian paints is one of a nation in reputational decline. Chinese citizens, fed by state propaganda but also their own experiences, now see gun violence, homelessness, and "rampant populism" when they look at America. The term "kill line" has trended on Chinese social media to describe the precariousness of American life. In Mexico, old grievances over the Mexican-American War have been reopened by Trump's rhetoric.

But here is what the foreign commentators and the pontiff both elide: the American people voted. They elected a president who promised to enforce the border. That is not a failure of the republic — it is the republic working as designed. A sovereign nation controlling its borders is not a moral crisis. It is the baseline function of a state — a function the Vatican itself understands perfectly well behind its own walls.

The real question isn't whether America will "live up to its ideals." It's whether a foreign head of state — religious or otherwise — has any standing to define what those ideals mean for 330 million citizens who never elected him.