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. 

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.

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