The Thorny Issue of Immigration and the Catholic Church

Just a week after the streets of Paris were lined with hundreds of thousands of Catholics eager to greet Pope Leo XIV, the city has devolved into chaos and violence — as has much of France as a whole. Teenage migrants and the teenage children and grandchildren of migrants are rioting across the country, setting fire to schools, municipal buildings, and even teachers, police, firefighters, and French civilians. The latest reports say that dozens of teachers and hundreds of police officers have been injured. Some 5,000 arrests have been made over the past week alone.

It is perhaps no accident that the migrant rioting follows in the immediate wake of the Holy Father’s triumphant visit to France. I wrote last week of the invincibility of the Catholic Faith and the Church’s ability to survive the assaults — no matter how violent — of the forces that would seek her destruction. That’s true: The Catholic Faith will survive until the end of time, but the Western Civilization which has so long been both the child and the caretaker of the Church might not.

The humanitarian universalist urge to erase all boundaries and distinctions, to make every nation the same … is nothing more than a dangerous attempt to pull Heaven down from above and crown our own world as Heaven.

The issue of mass immigration presents a particular dilemma for the Church. Of course, the Catholic Church demands that the God-given dignity of every human being be respected, upheld, and defended and instructs that foreigners are to be treated in a humane and respectful manner. Where possible, hospitality and refuge are to be offered to the abused and persecuted of the world.

What the Church does not demand is civilizational suicide — but that’s exactly what so many bishops and priests today advocate. In the U.S., bishops spend far more time ranting against the humane, common-sense immigration enforcement efforts of President Donald Trump than they spend addressing nearly any other social or political issue. Germany’s bishops have taken steps to outright penalize German parishioners who support the immigration restrictionist Alternative for Germany party. Too many bishops respond to the Western World’s desperate calls for “remigration now” with disdain and even hostility.

The French author Jean Raspail, a lifelong Catholic, understood why so many bishops today only heed half of the Church’s teachings on immigration and deride and ignore the other half. In his 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, Raspail imagines how Europe — and, more specifically, his native France — will respond to a starving armada of a million Indians invading the shores of Europe.

Over the course of the novel, the leaders of the West recognize that their world will be undone by the mass invasion of the Third World, but few have the willpower necessary to declare a horde of starving, emaciated foreigners enemies. It is the bishops who do not recognize the threat but actively embrace it. The European bishop assigned to Calcutta leads the Hindu foreigners onto their sinking barges and blesses their quest to transform his native land into an outpost of the Third World. The (fictional) Holy Father leads a delegation of clerics to provide food and fuel to the barges as they struggle towards the shores of France. Of course, the immigrant horde quickly dumps all the food overboard.

Read more The Decline of Bisexuality

In his introduction to the Vauban Books English translation of The Camp of the Saints, Nathan Pinkoski crystalizes Raspail’s position:

In Raspail’s telling, Catholic Christianity has for some time been in thrall to humanitarian universalism. The novel satirizes a left-liberal Catholicism that disdains national and civilizational particularity and renders the faith indistinguishable from the moral universalism of non-believers. Under the banner of “charity, solidarity, and universal conscience,” progressive clerics abandon their neighbors for the sake of the stranger. They practice the religion of humanity, a Christian heresy.

Too often, those who have severed charity from the virtues of justice, wisdom, and prudence invoke Scripture to justify their suicidal empathy. In doing so, they pervert charity itself, turning a genuine virtue into a platitudinous vice that wears virtue’s carcass like a skin suit. “After this I saw a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne, and in sight of the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands,” they recite (Revelation 7:9).

What these same folk just as often fail to take into account is that St. John is relating a vision of Heaven, where all are united in Christ in the Beatific Vision. While here on earth, we are not united; we are still divided into our own unique nations, tribes, and peoples, and God Himself placed us in our own nations and gave to us our own peoples.

The humanitarian universalist urge to erase all boundaries and distinctions, to make every nation the same, to inter-breed every people out of existence and into the same amorphous, indistinct mass is nothing more than a dangerous attempt to pull Heaven down from above and crown our own world as Heaven. In short, it is Luciferian, an effort to make earth into Heaven, the creature into the Creator, man into God.

In ages past, the leaders of the Church often followed in the footsteps of Christ, shouldering the cross and bowing their heads to be crowned with thorns. Today, under the spell of universalist humanism, the leaders of the Church too often reach for the glimmering crowns of worldly adulation and acceptance, failing to realize that their best chance at being like God is to embrace the crown that He wore.