The Treason Of The Clerics

What Do You Do When Church Leaders Work To Wreck Your Civilization?

Pope Pius V, who saved Europe frrom Ottoman invasion

A decade ago, when I was writing a blog for The American Conservative magazine, a commenter who posted as “German Reader” was a constant source of angry but reasonable observations about the migration situation in Europe. This reader, whose name I never discovered, was especially critical when I would post favorably about Christianity in Europe. Some of you readers of this newsletter will remember him.

He would explain, over and over, that he is full of anger at the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany, because in his view, they were active in destroying his country and his civilization. Why? By embracing mass migration from the Third World. German Reader would say that he didn’t care if the churches wanted to wreck themselves, but as he saw it, they were taking the entire country down, and calling it the work of God.

I thought of German Reader the other day when I read this Vatican News report about Pope Francis’s blessing a new mission by the Italian Bishops’ Conference to ferry migrants to Europe from Africa. Excerpt:

Trapani was the departure point for a search and rescue mission launched on Friday by Mediterranea Saving Humans, an Italian civil society platform that rescues migrants and refugees attempting the perilous sea crossing.

This will be the group’s 18th such operation since it was founded in 2018, but the first to be jointly organised with the Italian Bishops’ Migrantes foundation.

In a message sent on Saturday, Pope Francis sent his blessings and support for the mission of the Mediterranea Saving Humans.

"I wish you all the best and send my blessing to the crew of Mediterranea Saving Humans and to Migrantes. I pray for you. Thank you so much for your witness. May the Lord bless you and may the Virgin protect you," wrote the Pope.

Thanks to the Italian bishops' support, the Mare Jonio – a repurposed tugboat used for Mediterranea Saving Human’s search and rescue operations – will be joined by a support ship, tasked with observation and communication. It will be carrying extra volunteers and medical personnel, as well as an intercultural mediator and a small group of journalists.

The organization has decided to defy the Italian government:

Mediterranea – which has often been ordered by the Italian government to deliver those it rescues to distant northern ports – announced that it would not be accepting orders to disembark in any port outside of Sicily.

Because if they don’t have to go to northern ports, they can make more trips to Tunisia to ferry human cargo.

It’s a hell of a thing to realize that the leader of the one institution responsible more than any other for creating Western civilization — the Roman Catholic Church — is now actively working to dismantle that very civilization by opening the city gates, so to speak, wide to the invaders.

What do you even do with that if you are a Christian, Catholic or otherwise? German Reader is right. Do these sentimental clerics really think that life will go well for European Christians once the descendants of these migrants take power? How is life going for Christians in the Muslim world, eh? And even if they were to be religiously tolerant, there is still the matter of the erasure of distinct European cultures. The Great Replacement. And for what?

From the English translation of selected political essays of Renaud Camus, who came up with the Great Replacement concept:

So I was in some old villages of Hérault, big, round, fortified villages, with narrow streets, their lopsided houses squeezed tightly together. Already in the year 1000, many of them had stood in the same spot for some time. That was before France, some will say. Perhaps. Whatever the case, one might have thought that it was now after France. For at the windows and doorways of these old houses, the length of these very old streets, there almost exclusively appeared a population never before seen in these parts, which by its dress, demeanor and even language seemed not to belong there but rather to another people, another culture, another history. And in Lunel, which is not a village, there was this very same unsettling impression of having changed worlds without having left the old one, without having quit the streets and squares of our country, with their statues, churches, familiar old landmarks.

How many of us have the same feeling every day and not just in Hérault, Gard, or Vaucluse, not just in Seine-Saint-Denis when we still hazard to venture there, not just in the Nord or Pas-de-Calais, but in every part of France, along the sidewalks of our cities, on public transportation, in the Parisian metro, faced with the images and reality of our schools and universities? It’s as if, over the space of our lifetimes – less than that! – France has been in the process of changing its people; one sees one people, takes a nap and there’s another or several other peoples who appear to belong to other shores, other skies, other architectures, other customs – and who seem to think the same thing themselves. 

Meanwhile, last Friday at a German — I kid you not — “Festival Of Diversity”, a cultural enricher from Syria who had applied for asylum stabbed and killed three middle-aged Germans. :

The prosecutor's office said the man is accused of three counts of murder and eight counts of attempted murder and dangerous bodily harm, adding that he shares the ideology of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, which he joined before Friday.

"Due to his radical Islamist beliefs, he decided to kill as many people as possible, who he considered to be non-believers, at the Solingen city festival on August 23, 2024," the prosecutor's office said in a statement. "There he stabbed festival visitors repeatedly and deliberately in the neck and upper body with a knife."

How did the German federal authorities react? Well, how do you think?

Yes, the most important thing to the leadership class in Germany is not to protect German people from Islamist migrant murderers but to protect “diversity”. This vintage tweet from the late Norm Macdonald is evergreen:

Every week brings more evidence that the governing class in Britain and Europe cares more about abstract principles than its own people. The German economy, the economic engine of the European Union, continues to decline towards crisis. The ship is sinking, but the liberal elite band plays on. We will find out soon enough if the German people are demoralized unto death — remember, many Germans support the self-hating Left — or if there are enough of them who refuse to consent to their own extinction at the hands of their ruling class. What kind of man is willing to sit there and listen to a middle-aged liberal Karen tell him that protecting diversity is the most important thing to think about after a foreigner has murdered German citizens for not being Muslim?

And it’s not just Germany either. Same in Britain. It’s going to keep happening there, and in France, and everywhere else until something snaps.

Back to the Pope and the Italian bishops collaborating to dismantle and destroy European civilization. My European Conservative colleague Connor Tomlinson says “the immigration debate is over”. Excerpts:

This is not to suggest that British natives commit no crimes; only that increasing immigration from outside Western Europe has increased the crime rate. This fact is indisputable, but inadmissible for the stubborn adherents to multiculturalism. The Global Organised Crime Index found the UK was first in Western Europe, and second on the continent as a whole, for crimes committed by foreign actors in 2023. This coincides with a lenient justice system which, on 64,000 occasions, spared offenders with around 50 prior convictions any prison time. We do not know the number or the national origins of these criminals. The Office for National Statistics, the Home Office, and the Ministry of Justice conduct a conspiracy of silence by refusing to publish data on crimes committed by ethnicity or nationality. We could set immigration policy in accordance with which foreign nationals commit the most crimes. However, the civil service has refused to comply with ministers’ requests to publish “league tables” with the data they collect, but hide from the public. 

Instead, we are forced instead to infer patterns of behaviour from immigrants in other European countries. This is reasonable, given new arrivals are encouraged by liberal politicians in multicultural societies to hold tight to their native customs. In Denmark, immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey, and their descendents, are 13% of the population but commit 25% of violent crime, and comprise almost 50% of the prison population. They are 2.5 times more likely to commit violent crimes than native Danes. 

This conspiracy of silence extends to reporting. Last week, it was reported that sexual harassment incidents on Britain’s railways have increased by more than 50% since 2021. Sexual offences against women and girls have risen by 10% over the same period. Immigration was not mentioned once as a compounding factor. What is the use of journalists if they refuse to ask necessary questions? Government, too, obfuscates the problem by blaming “misogynistic influencers” like Andrew Tate instead, on the basis of which Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will bring in new counter-terrorism legislation proscribing “extreme misogyny” online. Just as when Sir David Amess was murdered by a second-generation-Somali Muslim called Ali Harbi Ali, migrant crime is invariably used to manufacture consent for legislation which censors and criminalises speech by the besieged native population. 

Immigrants also commit different kinds of crime to native Brits. Outside Europe, East Asia, and the Anglosphere, the worth of a woman or child is purely instrumental to the power or pleasure of the most violent man. Hence why Islamic honour-based violence has risen by 60% in two years and by 193% since 2016. When Britain sees a 75% annual rise in acid attacks on women, which formerly only occurred in the Middle East, south Asia, and Africa, we might be forgiven for supposing that we are dealing here with an imported pastime. 

Violence against women and girls is not only a phenomenon within immigrant households. Anti-white rape gangs in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford have groomed over 4,000 girls. A 2020 Home Office review found the Pakistani perpetrators were three times more likely than white Britons to commit child sexual offences. A GB News investigation found that 1 in every 2,200 Muslim males, and 1 in 1,700 Pakistanis, have been prosecuted for child sex offences between 1997 and 2017. 

… But we need not guess their intent: they telegraph it before arriving. In a story that I provided to GB News, North African trafficking gangs use videos of British women, filmed without consent, in states of drunkenness and undress, to advertise their services on Instagram. Foreign criminals regard our wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters as the spoils of war. The government knows about this, and does nothing. What more is to be debated here?

The point being made is that every one of these criminals does not need to be here. Every one of their victims would be alive, unmolested, if not for government policy. Every crime committed by an immigrant is both an avoidable tragedy, and a result of choices made by politicians, civil servants, lawyers, and NGOs. 

And by the Pope and some Catholic bishops! To be a Catholic in Europe who is obedient to the hierarchy is to consent to your own conquest. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.

What is to be done? I wish I knew. The French writer Julien Benda is famous for a phrase, le trahison des clercs, meaning “the treason of the intellectuals,” by which he meant the abdication of the intelligentsia of their proper standards. On the migrant crisis, Europeans are now faced with treason of the clerics. As a believing Christian who, though no longer Catholic, holds that Western civilization stands or falls by the health of the one institution that, more than any other, built it, it makes me sick to say this. But look at the evidence.

I know Catholic and Anglican priests who are disgusted with their leadership over this and other issues, so it’s not all of them. But it is the leadership class. Who ever imagined that we would be in a condition in which defending the West would require opposing the successor of Pius V, who saved Europe from Islamic invasion by organizing the Holy League, which managed to sink the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571? That we are in such a condition tells you a lot about the depth and breadth of the crisis in the West.

Tomlinson concludes (and he writes as a Briton, about Britain primarily):

To continue with this culture-blind mass immigration policy is a cruelty to those with nowhere else to go. The harms are so evident at this point, there is nothing left to debate. Those seeking to tie you up in conversation are just trying to delay the day that action is taken. We can no longer afford to put that off, if we want to recover a livable country from the rubble of decades of government mismanagement.

The British people can change their government. Catholics cannot change the Church’s government. And don’t say that Protestantism is a solution. As the atheist German Reader pointed out back in the day, the Protestant leadership is as compromised on this point as the Catholic leadership. A couple of conservative German Catholic friends last year warned me not to be on the side of AfD, the so-called “far-right” party in Germany, because they are avowedly not Christian, and, in the eyes of my Catholic friends, harbor darkness within. They may be right. But if you are a German Catholic voter who has to choose between mainstream parties who are actually destroying your country with liberal migration policies supported by the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, or AfD, what do you do?

Is Religious Progressivism The Answer?

My friend David Brooks can be almost peerless in some of his insights about sociology, but not this time. Here he is commenting on a new book by the sociologist James Davison Hunter:

The core question in Hunter’s book is: Can you have an Enlightenment political system atop a post-Enlightenment culture? I’d say the answer to that question is: over the long term, no.

The task, then, is to build a new cultural consensus that is democratic but also morally coherent. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.

Who can possibly believe that? I’m serious. For one thing, all Christianity is declining in the United States, but religious progressivism is declining faster than other forms. For another, well, European Christianity has been broadly progressive since at least the 1960s. Result: Christianity is almost dead on the continent, and worse, religious progressives in power have been working to divide and dissolve Europe via the sentimental humanitarianism of mass migration.

There is zero evidence that religious progressivism can rescue a society, or even the society of the church. But elites will convince themselves that it will work, because it confirms their priors, I guess.

Philip Rieff’s theory of culture said that every culture is defined by what it forbids. Forbidding draws the lines around what makes a culture distinct. Religious progressivism distinguishes itself by its permissiveness, especially on matters related to sexuality, but also on matters of “diversity”. Religious progressives are very big on sanctifying the Other, for example. What Brooks seems to want is a religion that blesses what middle-class liberals value. Well, that’s what the Episcopal Church is — and the political scientist Ryan Burge, a religious progressive who studies American religion, has seen the data and declared that “the death of the Episcopal Church is near.” It’s true for the rest of Mainline Protestantism.

As for US Catholicism, the leadership class has been functionally progressive for a long time now. It appears from the perspective of 2024 that the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI only delayed the process with episcopal appointments (and even then some of their appointments were very poor, e.g., Uncle Ted McCarrick). Religious progressivism is the last stop on the path to death and dissolution. The good news is that nearly all the young men who have become priests in recent years, or who are on their way to the priesthood, are theologically orthodox (NYT: “America’s New Catholic Priests: Young, Confident, and Conservative”).

These men are going to have to serve congregations that are more liberal than they are, so it’s not going to be easy. The point, though, is that religious progressives have no children, so to speak. By and large, their kids don’t see the point of being members of the Church. It is not the case that religious conservatives unfailingly have kids who remain faithful to the church. I saw an Italian study from a few years back showing that in Italy, the most devout Catholic families see only a 22 percent retention rate in the Church of their children. It is absolutely not the case that religious conservatives can sit smugly looking on at the ruin of liberal Christianity. We are all in this together.

That said, what is emerging is a post-Christian America. I explained all this in The Benedict Option (which Brooks generously called at the time “the most important religious book of the decade”). Europe is simply much farther along in de-Christianization — a process that Europe’s liberal religious establishments have aided and abetted. The Christians in Europe who are going to endure are those who are committed to active, communal orthodoxy — often in the face of opposition, even persecution, by church authorities. In the US, it was perhaps not as clear as it ought to have been in 2017, when The Benedict Option was published, that it is the only realistic future for American Christians. So many are afraid to recognize the bitter truth about the state of the faith in America. Many straw-manned my argument, saying I was calling for heading for the hills to build enclaves. In fact, I said openly in the first chapter that “there is no escape” from liquid modernity. We can only endure it — and that requires us laypeople to figure out, wherever we live, how to adapt the general Benedictine model to life in our place, according to our own religious tradition. As I say in the book, the Benedict Option is going to look different for rural Evangelicals than for urban Catholics (for example). The point is to read the book and, as “creative minorities,” innovate to make it work where you are.

Religious progressivism is a dead end. But so too is a religious conservatism that consists of nothing more than holding the correct moral and theological beliefs, voting Republican, and thanking the good Lord that we aren’t like those pitiful liberal Christians.