Role Of Church Elites In Europe's Suicide

Christians Cannot Afford To Trust Ecclesial Leaders To Defend The Faith

In Paris earlier this year, migrants blaspheme against St. Joan of Arc equestrian statue. Many such cases

I wrote something on Friday here about Pope Leo’s recent exhortation to love the poor, as Christians should, but complaining, and complaining bitterly, about the part of the document in which he said Christians have a moral duty to open the door wide to migrants. I didn’t send that to the entire list of subscribers, just the paid ones (there are seven times more unpaid subscribers than paid ones), but enough of those who saw the piece put it, or parts of it, on Facebook that I’ve gained over 100 new subscribers in the past 48 hours. That has never happened. So I’m going to post it again to the entire list today, below. There’s clearly demand for it.

But before I do, let me tell you what I did this weekend. I have been at a conference in Dubrovnik, where conservative European politicians and others gathered to celebrate the memory of Charlie Kirk, and to talk about what his legacy means for them, given that Europeans face free speech challenges that dwarf what Americans have to deal with. Always, my fellow Americans, thank God for the First Amendment!

There is, of course, the state, and parastate entities like the European Union, trying to control speech through legislation, like the odious Digital Services Act, and diktats handed down from on high. There is also real-world dangers of criticizing Islam, which could cost you your life. To that end, we all heard a speech by Thibault de Montbrial, a top French lawyer and law professor who is enmeshed in France’s security leadership, and who has had to live under constant police guard for the last nine years as the cost of his professional role in fighting Islamism and Islamic terror networks in France. He told us that the French intelligence services would only let him travel to Croatia if he agreed to be accompanied by an undercover armed intelligence agent. (I saw this person later, and let me just say that I would not want to cross hostile paths with an armed French intelligence agent.)

De Montbrial has a new book coming out in France next week, about what he regards as his country’s “emergency” situation. I suppose the talk he gave yesterday, in English, is part of it. He warned that western Europeans should prepare themselves for mass violence at the level the continent (minus the 1990s Balkans) hasn’t seen since the end of World War II. That is to say (though he didn’t use this term), civil wars. If you see this man’s Wikipedia page, you realize that he is in a position to know what he is talking about. He explained that Islamists have managed to infiltrate both public and private institutions all over Europe, and are using it to their advantage.

How did all this happen? De Montbrial, a practicing Catholic, said that the core of the problem is cultural — namely, that France (and Europe) has lost all sense of who and what it is. It has forgotten its past, and any sense of connection to it, and has lost its identity. (This is what Renaud Camus calls “The Great Deculturation”). How do you expect young people to resist people (Muslims) who are hostile to Western civilization, and who have a strong culture, if you have produced a generation, or generations, of people who have no culture? He said that in France, Muslim activists are even succeeding in winning over the hearts and minds of no small number of native-born French, by telling them, basically: “Look around you at what a nihilistic, pornified disaster modern Europe has become. Is that really what you want? Convert, join the ummah, and gain a story. Become part of the glorious march through history of the sons and daughters of the Prophet.”

It works, he said. (Basically, De Montbrial was like a character in a Houllebecq novel, or rather, the picture he paints of a spiritually exhausted, deracinated people is like Houellebecq’s.) This, he went on, is why though France and other European countries have to use legal, political, and law enforcement means to fight this stuff, the core of the struggle is cultural. If Europe doesn’t recover its sense of history and culture, and in a meaningful way, such that its people are willing to fight to defend it, all will be lost. (A subsequent speaker made the point more explicit: at the heart of culture is cult, or religion. Either Europe re-Christianizes, or it Islamizes. There is no stable third option.)

Another speaker, the American conservative student activist Will Donohue, spoke about how much the future of Europe matters to America — even if many Americans don’t realize it. Europe is where America came from, the College Republicans chief said; if we lose Europe, we have lost something vital to America. I asked Donohue later for an interview, as this point is essential to the message of my next book.

Anyway, in the hallway after these speeches, I spoke to Ivan, a local Dubrovnik resident, age 40. He told me that he is a strongly believing Catholic, but is extremely frustrated with the state of the Church in Croatia. This country is more observant than most European countries, but, he said, its ethos is highly feminine. There is little to no sense that there is something to defend. The clerical leadership has become saturated with feminine virtues, and have turned the church into something better suited for little old ladies with their rosary beads.

(“Is this true?” I asked a faithful Catholic Croatian friend later. His face lit up. “Oh, don’t get me started on that topic,” he growled. So I guess it is.)

I told Ivan that we don’t have this problem in Orthodoxy, but of course I understand that Orthodoxy is a no-go zone for a Croat, because that is the religion of their enemies, the Serbs. Yet, I added, the same thing he observes in Croatian Catholicism is something I experienced all the time in US Catholicism — though it didn’t become quite so clear to me until I started attending Orthodox liturgies twenty years ago. Somehow, Orthodoxy manages to be masculine without being macho. We still revere our warrior saints from the early centuries.

Talking to Ivan after the de Montbrial and Donohue talks really puts the comments I made last week critical of the pope’s words about migration into context. Europe is facing a struggle for its soul and its future. Mass migration is the primary driver of the crisis, but at its heart is the loss of vitality of Christianity, the very religion that made Europe. The laughable disgrace of what the gay dean of the Canterbury Cathedral has done to that ancient shrine, in a cringe effort to reach out to “marginalized communities,” is a sign of how useless and corrupt the Anglican leadership is:

The artist commissioned by the gay cathedral dean to do this, Alex Vellis, describes himself as a “they/them queer vegan.” I personally know several rock-solid vicars in the C of E, but it’s hard to see that that ecclesial body has any kind of future with a leadership class that permits and celebrates desecration like this. Who can respect it, if it doesn’t even respect itself?

But don’t be quick to assume that something like this could never happen in a Catholic cathedral. Remember that Pope Francis allowed the pagan Pachamama statue to be paraded through St. Peter’s a few years back. And the venerable St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna has been the site of similar blasphemies over the past few years (see here and here).

It’s what you get when you have a church leadership that has been formed by feminine attitudes of “compassion” and “welcome,” without being balanced by masculine virtues. To be clear, Christianity needs both the gifts that men and women bring. An overly masculinized church would have its own set of problems. But in the West, church leadership, both Catholic and Protestant, has become badly unbalanced towards the feminine. This, I told Ivan, is why in the US, young men are flocking to the Orthodox church, but also to particular Catholic and Protestant parishes where they feel that they don’t have to be made to be ashamed of being men with natural masculine virtues that need to be suppressed, as opposed to developed and put in service of the holy.

The feminization of Western Christianity is leading to its suicide in Europe. With that background, here is what I wrote on Friday about Pope Leo’s recent “apostolic exhortation” concerning migration (which, to be clear, was a paragraph in a long letter about care for the poor, which is standard Christian teaching):

Pope Leo: Mass Migration Is Providential

Yesterday Pope Leo issued an apostolic exhortation, titled Dilexi te (“I Have Loved You”), which is mostly about telling Catholics to be kind to the poor. Nothing new or objectionable about that. Then there is this paragraph about migrants:

75. The Church’s tradition of working for and with migrants continues, and today this service is expressed in initiatives such as refugee reception centers, border missions and the efforts of Caritas Internationalis and other institutions. Contemporary teaching clearly reaffirms this commitment. Pope Francis has recalled that the Church’s mission to migrants and refugees is even broader, insisting that “our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote and integrate. Yet these verbs do not apply only to migrants and refugees. They describe the Church’s mission to all those living in the existential peripheries, who need to be welcomed, protected, promoted and integrated.” He also said: “Every human being is a child of God! He or she bears the image of Christ! We ourselves need to see, and then to enable others to see, that migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved. They are an occasion that Providence gives us to help build a more just society, a more perfect democracy, a more united country, a more fraternal world and a more open and evangelical Christian community.” The Church, like a mother, accompanies those who are walking. Where the world sees threats, she sees children; where walls are built, she builds bridges. She knows that her proclamation of the Gospel is credible only when it is translated into gestures of closeness and welcome. And she knows that in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.

Hmm. Are these the faces of Jesus?

These are the two Muslim men — one from Algeria, one born in France as the son of migrants — from their video pledging loyalty to ISIS. This is what they did in 2016:

After entering the church armed with knives, Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean subjected Father Jacques Hamel, three nuns and two lay people to an anti-Christian harangue, shouting “Vous, les chrétiens, vous nous supprimez!” [You, the Christians, we will do away with you!]. They then forced Father Hamel to his knees before the altar and cut his throat while yelling “Allahu akbar!”

As they approached the 85-year-old priest while he said mass, Father Hamel said, “Go away, Satan.” Then they butchered him at the altar.

The last thing poor martyred Father Jacques saw before he died were these Faces of Jesus™. The last thing these two migrant and migrant-adjacent divines saw before they died were the French police who shot them dead, which I guess is just like the Romans killing Our Lord.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” said Jesus. Funnily enough, two of Pope Leo’s Faces of Jesus™ — these being young asylum seekers from Afghanistant — were arrested this summer and charged with kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old girl in the English market town of Warwickshire.

Let us not forget the thousands of white working-class English girls raped and forced into sexual slavery by either South Asian Faces of Jesus™ or UK-born descendants of such in the rape gang crime spree in Rotherham and other English towns. One wonders if the Holy Father and the Catholic bishops see the faces of Christ in those girls, or if they are too blinded by the whiteness of the children’s faces to perceive their humanity. Many such cases among right-thinking liberals.

An English friend who lives in a peaceful suburban town told me recently that she can no longer allow her 13-year-old daughter to go to the corner market on the local high street unaccompanied. Last year, two Faces of Jesus™ opened a barber shop nearby, which has attracted unsavory characters. She said local police told her they believe the barber shop is a front for criminal activity, and are investigating. English people like this depriving themselves of the “occasions of Providence” provided by encounters with Turkish barbers and their clientele just goes to show you how hard-hearted they have become, I guess.

A year ago, news broke in Sweden of a spate of rapes of elderly women by asylum-seeking Faces of Jesus™ who were supposed to be caring for them. According to “Elsa,” an 84-year-old Swede in a program that sent professional carers to her home to look after her, her migrant visitor presented rather more than the holy face to her one day:

One day when I was sitting here by my dining table, he took out a tube of lubricant, which he said was especially for the elderly. Then he pulled down his trousers and showed me his erect penis. At that moment, the doorbell went. Two missionaries who wanted to preach the word of God showed up. I have never been so thankful for such people as that time.’

She reported him to the management of the nursing service, which took the unnamed suspect off her case. But it did not fire him, and he later persisted in his missionary efforts. Then, one day, he came back:

‘I tried to push him away, but he was strong, and I am very weak. He raped me here in my own bed, in my own flat. I shower myself extra carefully. I feel so dirty. But it doesn’t go away.’

After Elsa went public with her story, a number of elderly Swedish women came forward with similar accounts. In Niort, France, earlier this year, a 20-year-old Afghan Face of Christ™ was charged with raping an 80-year-old French woman to death. It was the least these women could to to fulfill their Christian duty to “welcome, protect, promote and integrate” these unfortunate men from what the Holy Father called the “existential peripheries.”

Sweden may not be a particularly Christian country, but over the past two decades, it went further than any other European country in practicing the papal prescription of welcome to migrants. Result: Sweden became the rape capital of Europe, and is awash with violent crime committed by migrants, including bombings. Shame on those Swedes for not working harder to integrate the Faces of Jesus™, and thereby forge what Pope Leo calls “a more united country”!

Quoting his predecessor, Pope Leo writes, “We ourselves need to see, and then to enable others to see, that migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved.”

Too true! In Budapest, rare among European cities, women can walk alone, even at night, without having the opportunity to offer welcome, respect, and love to male migrants eager to get to know them. Alas for the Hungarians, the exuberant love shown by male migrants towards women in other European countries is not an experience open to Budapesters, owing to the anti-migrant policies of the Orban government.

The European Union fines Hungary €1 million per day over its refusal to adopt more liberal European migration standards. Just think of how many bridges to migrants could be built with that money! To paraphrase the pope, “Where Hungary sees threats, the Church sees children.”

Stupid blind Hungarians! Don’t they know what’s good for them? George Soros tried telling them in 2015, when he said that Europe “needs to accept at least a million asylum seekers annually for the foreseeable future.” But the Magyars didn’t listen. Now the Hungarian people suffer from a lack of these “occasions of Providence” celebrated by the Holy Father.

It is a black mark on Europe’s soul, it seems, that so many of these brothers and sisters have been sequestered by bigotry into neighborhoods, so-called “no-go zones” that are now too dangerous for police to enter. Would it kill the police to take advantage of these occasions of Providence to bring cookies to these sainted periphery-dwellers, in what the pope calls “a gesture of closeness and welcome”? (Actually, it might literally kill them, but let’s not dwell on that fact; it confuses the Narrative.)

A newspaper investigation this summer found that hundreds of Faces of Jesus™ living in asylum-seeker hotels funded by British taxpayers had been arrested and charged with crimes, especially sexual assault, in 2025 alone. The British government, Good Samaritans all, has been spending $147 million each month over the past two years housing Faces of Jesus™ in such hotels.

At least London has become a center of Welcome, Respect, and Love for migrants. In 1970, only about 20 percent of Londoners were foreign-born. Today that number is 40 percent. Less than 50 percent of the people living in the capital of Great Britain are classified as “white British,” thus, helping to build what the pope hymns as “a more perfect democracy.”

How else would London and other British cities have been able to muster so many democracy-perfecters into its streets on last week’s anniversary of the October 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Jewish civilians. The protesters were there to voice their support for Hamas. One of them, a British sympathizer named Fiona Smith, was asked about how appropriate this was in the immediate wake of the Manchester synagogue slayings carried out by Face of Jesus™ Jihad al-Shamie, who came to Britain as a child from Syria. She told a reporter, “I don’t give a f*** about the Jewish community right now.”

Well, some intemperate folk say that they did kill Christ, so one can perhaps understand Ms. Smith’s righteous anger, even though her intemperate words don’t help build Pope Leo’s “more fraternal world.” But hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!

In his apostolic exhortation, Pope Leo praises the work of Caritas International, the Church-funded organization that welcomes migrants. Caritas does not have clean hands. It was involved in a massive embezzlement scandal in Luxembourg last year, when $67 million in donations were found to have gone missing. In 2014, the priest who directed Caritas in one Sicilian town was charged with soliciting sexual favors from migrants in exchange for helping them enter Italy. Last year, a progressive parish priest, Father Massimo Biancalani, was removed by his bishop after an illegal Liberian immigrant was accused of attempting to rape a woman in Biancalani’s rectory, long a haven for illegal migrants, and the source of many complaints by locals over crime and sanitation problems.

The illegal immigrant had been a resident of the parish of Santa Maria Maggiore for a month, ever since he left the repatriation center in Potenza. He is registered under several false names; he has a drug conviction; last year, his application for a special protection permit was rejected. We mentioned the string of incidents involving the Biancalani rectory: in April alone, there were three attacks in one week, in this case clashes between immigrants. The latest incident was a stab wound to the abdomen by a 35-year-old.

Caritas Italy found places for the 140 or so migrants living in Don Biancalani’s rectory, spreading the love and welcome for these Faces of Jesus™ across Italy. For his part, Don Biancalani denounced his critics as “fascists.”

Europe is de-Christianizing, leaving fewer and fewer believers to offer gestures of closeness and welcome to those like the military-age young men landing on the English shore daily in dinghies. Christians are now minorities in four European countries — Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Czechia — and even in those countries where Christians still constitute a majority, they are aging. In 2020, the average age of European Christians was 45; the average age of European Muslims was 34. Of those Europeans who identify as Christian, only a minority of those practice the faith.

Of the Catholic Church, Leo writes that “she knows that her proclamation of the Gospel is credible only when it is translated into gestures of closeness and welcome.” Based on these alarming statistics, it appears that native Europeans themselves need to have the Gospel proclaimed to them, but never mind.

One would think that the dying of the Christian light on the continent where Christianity first began to spread would be the top concern of church leaders like Pope Leo. But who can fathom the minds of contemporary divines, sequestered in the safety of Vatican walls and episcopal palaces, where contemplation is perhaps purer?

Meanwhile, in France, the light of the church comes more and more from the fires lit to burn them down. As France loses one church every two weeks to fire or demolition, it gains one mosque at the same rate. But today’s Church is too busy “building bridges” to migrants than building churches.

It is probably impolite to say so, but it could be the case that the Gospel seems less credible to faithless Europeans when those whose special responsibility it is to proclaim it seem more interested in replacing them than converting them.

In all seriousness, it is true that Christians have a moral responsibility to help refugees and migrants. But it is also true, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that sovereign states have the right to limit migration. Pope Benedict XVI articulated this principle in his 2010 address on the World Day of Migration, saying:

“The Church recognizes the right [to emigrate] in every human person...At the same time, States have the right to regulate migration flows and defend their own frontiers, always guaranteeing respect due to the dignity of each and every person.”

His successors seem to have forgotten this. Anyway, as mentioned, the overall tone and content of Dilexe te is about the responsibility of Christians to the poor. There is a certain kind of poverty lived by European peoples who have been pushed to the “existential peripheries” of their native countries by mass migration. Alas, to the pope and other contemporary church leaders, those people don’t count.

Does the Vatican see the face of Christ in the old women raped, even to death, by asylum seekers? Does it see the face of Christ in the girls sex-trafficked by Pakistani migrants and descendants of these migrants in Britain? Does it see the face of Christ in the English mum who can no longer let her daughter walk alone to the corner market, and in European peoples who are now afraid to go out of their homes at night for fear of suffering migrant crime?

Jesus himself was abused by religious authorities, who thought they knew everything, and delivered to the Romans for death. Of the religious authorities in his day, Jesus condemned them for their disconnection from the people. “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger,” said Our Lord (Matthew 23:4).

As it was in the days of the Apostles, so it is in the days of their successors.

[end]

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That was what I sent on Friday. Last night at dinner with some folks who stuck around after the end of the conference, I talked about it with other Europeans, most of whom are Catholic. A French man said that not long ago, authorities there shut down a Muslim school where Islamic radicalism was being taught to children, in violation of French law. Local Muslims gathered to protest, and were joined by a Catholic priest, who stood in solidarity with them, telling the Muslims, “we are all children of God.” A Dutch man listening to this conversation said that his own government decided that the migrant centers in the big cities were too full, so without consulting local authorities, they re-distributed the asylum seeker population throughout the country. Now this man’s village has a large number of Muslims living in it. Nobody was asked if they wanted it.

The French fellow participating in the conversation said the French government did the exact same thing, in the name of equity (meaning, all of France should experience Pope Leo’s occasions of Providence. “Mayors of small towns all across France complained that they were not even warned this was coming, that government buses just showed up one day and dumped these migrants onto them,” he said.

I told them that this kind of thing was foreseen in the novel The Camp Of The Saints, which has just been translated and re-issued in English, by Vauban Books. One of the French people at the table lit up. “Jean Raspail [the author] saw it all coming!” said the French man. “Can you believe he wrote that book in 1971?!” I told others at the table that we have long been warned never, ever to read that book, because it is a “white supremacist” tract.

It is true that there are parts of the novel that are unpleasant to read, but overall, it is utterly prophetic, and the difficult lines should not dissuade the discerning reader from reading it. In fact, I said, if you read the actual book, you’ll understand that the real villains of the novel are not the migrant hordes, but the French elites — including bishops and priests — who capitulate to the invasion of Europe. For them, it’s all about compassion über alles, and seeking redemption from civilizational self-hatred by submission to the Other.

One French person at the table who had read the book said that the conclusion is, for him, the most shocking: a small band of French patriots, including a naturalized Asian migrant who joins them because he believes in France, take up arms to resist … and are bombed into oblivion by the French air force, which has turned against its own people, as has the government.

Seeing shocked faces around the table, I explained to Protestants, Orthodox, and secularists there that not every European Catholic accepts the corruption and cowardice of the Church’s leadership class. The traditionalists, for example, are awake and trying to resist it as best they can — but they are despised and marginalized by church elites, many of whom somehow cannot see the Face Of Christ™ in those living, breathing European Catholics who want to reclaim and defend their sacred patrimony. If I can borrow lines from Pope Leo’s exhortation to embrace migrants, to today’s clerical elites, by and large, Catholic traditionalists “only represent a problem to be solved,” and are not “brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved.”

Alas, if only they loved the Koran, and not the Tridentine mass!

This is where we are in Europe. This Sunday morning, I am thinking about what the speaker Thibault de Montbrial said in his speech: that mass violence is coming, and Europeans had better prepare themselves for it now. Again, de Montbrial is not some fringe wingnut, but a major figure in the French national security establishment.

American readers, you will not learn about this stuff from US media, or if you do, it will be only to dismiss it as paranoid far-right propaganda. Trust me, it’s not. Living over here these past four years has taught me how badly informed — and intentionally misinformed, I would venture to say — Americans are about what’s really going on in Europe. Well, guess what: many Europeans feel the same way about their own media, which are determined to control the Narrative by demonizing anyone who objects to it, and often ignoring actual things going on in the real world that contradict what they would prefer to believe.

I saw the same thing two decades ago working in American journalism: editors and reporters preferred to stay silent on two particular issues that caught my attention — Islamic radicalization and the role that homosexual networks in the Catholic priesthood played in the abuse scandal — because it was more important to them not to give aid and comfort to what right-wing people believed than it was to report on the world as it actually is, and let people make up their own minds.

This newsletter goes out five times a week to paid subscribers. It’s not always about culture-war stuff, but I do try my best to keep readers informed about what’s really happening in Europe and the rest of the world — things you are not likely to see reported in your own media, or if it is reported, then it’s spun falsely. I hope you will subscribe. I can only do this daily with your support.