By Thomas Colsy, Catholic Herald (UK), April 4, 2024

What’s really behind the “migrant crisis”? Is it even a “crisis” anymore or has a normality been begrudgingly accepted that the borders of the ancient nations of Europe are now completely porous to the multitudes, which invariably includes criminals, terrorists and persons with no intention of assimilating to the religious or cultural landscape in which they have relocated?

What is the just and reasonable approach here, especially given that our leaders have no proposed solution and the present norm, particularly in Western Europe, appears – in the minds of its liberal governors – to be for immigration to continue ad infinitum?

One man that is qualified to offer genuine wisdom to all Europeans and the nations facing these problems is a prelate who is tipped to be a potential candidate to succeed Pope Francis in the papacy.

“Europe,” says Cardinal Robert Sarah, reflecting on the continent’s historically high rate of immigration in 2019, “seems programmed for self-destruction.”

“Europe,” says Cardinal Robert Sarah, reflecting on the continent’s historically high rate of immigration in 2019, “seems programmed for self-destruction.”

Cardinal Sarah comes at this from a uniquely appropriate position to comment. Not only is he one of the most eloquent, thoughtful, gentle, prayerful and reverential bishops in the entire Catholic Church, he is also a man who hails from the West of Africa and has worked for years in Rome and at the heart of Europe.

A man who deeply loves Europe and its inheritance and all it has given to the world on firm foundations of Catholic Faith, the elderly cardinal is forthcoming in making it known that he sees this same patrimony as under attack by relentless streams of migration.

His is a lament, not just for Europe but for a phenomenon that so rarely seems to benefit all parties involved. Hence Sarah has condemned the “slavery” which the “smugglers” of criminal organisations subject their victims to as they circumvent laws to ferry hordes across borders.

“Migrants who arrive in Europe are penniless, without work, without dignity,” he describes. “The church cannot cooperate with this new form of slavery that has become mass migration.”

Those who carelessly promote this phenomenon (which would include many dubious NGOs) bear responsibility in the inevitable tragic loss of life, isolation, loneliness, and dependency migrants face.

“[T]hese young people are presented with Europe as Eldorado, we tell them that they will have everything when this is not true,” Sarah notes.

This is not to say that migration cannot be broadly beneficial, both to those who migrate and the recipient nation, in ordinary circumstances and according to prudence. Saints Anselm and Augustine of Canterbury, pivotal shapers of Christianity in the British Isles, arrived from Italy. Switzerland was evangelised by North African missionaries.

Cardinal Sarah’s point is that what we are facing in Europe is on a scale that is neither ordinary nor prudent.

“If the West continues in this fatal way, there is a great risk that, due to a lack of birth, it will disappear, invaded by foreigners, just as Rome has been invaded by barbarians,” he said.

Every single nation in Europe has a negative birth rate. Our populations are shrinking, and as they get older we have entire generations more numerous than their offspring whose pensions and governmental services need paying for by a working, tax-paying citizenry.

For a long time, since shortly after the middle of the twentieth century, Europeans, collectively speaking, simply have not been having enough children to balance this financial deficit.

Given the scale of the impending crisis, one might expect all governments, rather than a few in central and eastern Europe, such as Hungary, to be making every political effort to reverse this societally and demographically catastrophic trend. But there are two obstacles Western politicians are unwilling to circumvent: their commitment to sexual liberation and corporate feminism.

As a result, liberal politicians have taken to importing populations from far and wide to plug the gap.

The contraceptive pill’s success in destroying marriage, relations between men and women, an appreciation for the gravity of sex, in addition to actual birth-rates, has been well documented since the 1960s (outside of mainstream media, of course). In Adam and Eve After the Pill, author Mary Eberstadt describes the “deep toll” that has occurred.

At the same time, the drive to push young girls to imitate men in pursuing careers has led many to forgo having children altogether – a lifestyle choice a proportion come to regret (though that can’t be considered or spoken of, again, in mainstream circles) – and means that many of those women who do eventually have children to do so at a much later age and thus have fewer children.

It has been reasonably expounded that multinational corporations zealously support mass-migration for the same reason they support feminism – an inflated labour force tips the supply-demand balance in favour of the corporate machine and deflates the wages employers must pay employees for the same work.

At the time of the contraceptive pill’s emergence, it was far more common that an employee could enjoy what Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno recommended – one wage sufficient to support an entire family. Today, the economy, like the culture of sex and relationships, has deeply weakened the prospects for family formation. It is little wonder that not a single European country is replacing its own population in human generation.

Europe faces a choice: either the “self destruction” that Cardinal Sarah warns of will continue to its completion, or it will have to turn its back on a hypersexualised hedonic culture and the false exultation of women as men. To sustain a nation from generation to generation relies on people coming from within that nation (lest it become an internationalised conglomerate as opposed to a nation with an identity).

Historians tell us that no civilisation has ever survived an extended period with “sub-replacement fertility” that is below 2.2 children per two adults. This is not good news for Europe – for almost half a century, European nations have been well below this. Now facing the challenge of where newcomers will arrive from, rather than being generated at home, politicians are choosing for them to arrive from far and wide, with the attendant risk of them little regard for the civilisation to which they move.

The Church’s teaching on migration is measured and careful. It walks the same line as the Bible: hospitality and warmth and charity to the foreigner is absolutely warranted; allowing foreign and erroneous ways of life and religions to disrupt and displace your own ways is not. Especially when your nation has been blessed with a foundation of the objectively true religion and a relationship with the objectively real God of revelation.

Ancient Israel, as Catholic Herald columnist Gavin Ashenden describes to Mgr Nazir-Ali in the Merely Catholic podcast, balanced generous hospitality to the foreigner with a zealous guarding of its internal coherence and national membership. Newcomers were able to join the Holy Nation, if they were willing to prove themselves an authentic friend to it and not intent on refashioning it in another – especially when it came to religion – image. In fact, when kings of Israel and Juda such as Solomon and Rehoboam allowed foreigners to begin to do as much, the Bible tells us their lax migration and religious-cultural policies incurred divine wrath every time.

Pope Pius XII was the first to promulgate an authoritative document on migration in 1952 in Exsul Familia Nazarethana. His exhortations, although they addressed a very different era and placed emphasis in a different place to where Cardinal Sarah places his today, should be reasonable to all ears – those of the immigrant and native; of the religious and irreligious.

Citing that the earth was created for all to enjoy, Pius declared that the family has a right to a living space, especially given its expansiveness. When this right is unjustly breached by a persecuting government or by war and such, the family has a right to seek and enjoy such a living space in a place where such space is abundant. Pius mentions the Holy Family, who fled into Egypt during persecution.

“Since land everywhere offers the possibility of supporting a large number of people, the sovereignty of the State, although it must be respected, cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate or unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations, provided of course, that the public wealth, considered very carefully, does not forbid this,” stated the Pope.

Essentially, he says, share generously but be prudent about it: the “public wealth” – which for the Pope was not purely material but religious, cultural and social – must not be severely compromised by new arrivals.

A nation, according to the Church’s Thomistic philosophy is a family of families. This means there must be a certain coherence and unity to it (while allowing for a degree of ethnic diversity) and a shared sense of the common good – helpfully along when inhabitants share the same faith.

When immigration occurs at a careful and controlled rate, and newcomers actively want to join the family of families – revering the good things the place has produced without a wish to destroy of replace them – it can prove a great benefit.

When it is done at a carelessly large scale and rate, and scarcely seems to consider the aforementioned “public wealth” but instead endangers citizens through higher risks of crime and terrorism, it invariably is not a benefit. Germany can attest to this after it took in 1.6 million migrants in a single year in 2015, a year that finished on New Year’s Eve with historically record-high incidents of rape.

Charity must be applied to both parties involved in immigration: the migrant and the recipient nation. Ultimately, the State’s primary obligations are towards its own citizens, even if it must maintain obligations to others.

The Holy Family when they fled to Egypt, it must be remembered, did return to their homeland – and it was important for the young Jesus to fulfil his vocation there, for he had obligations to the nation and people into which he was born and which nourished him; as such obligations nourish all of us depending on where we are born.

“We still beseech God constantly that the refugees, the prisoners and the deported who have been carried far from their native lands may return to their own beloved countries as soon as possible,” Pius XII says.

Cardinal Sarah concurs. He wonderfully describes in a very Thérèsian manner the nations of Europe and abroad as the wildflowers in a garden and on a meadow – a beautiful and divinely-willed diversity in distinction that should be preserved rather than eradicated. Herein is a paradox of the immigration debate that rarely gets aired: it is often those who urge for a more cautious border policy who have genuine reverence and desire to preserve the beauty of a world replete with Italians, Native Americans, Japanese and Ethiopians, while those who promulgate open borders would, whether they realise it or not, have it that that beautiful diversity of humanity disappears in a swirling mass of confusion and bland conformity.  

While Pius exhaustively recalls the initiatives and generosity the Church has always offered to migrants, and points out that it is far from an extreme nationalist institution which opposes migration generically, he cautions that caveats ought to be heeded. The one who migrates ought to, in most instances, have a good reason for migration – either due to war or famine or lack of substance or persecution. Pius also urges those nations with ample land, such as Brazil and United States, to be more accommodating to migrants than those nations who are not as blessed with so much physical space.

When Exsul Familia was published it was 1952 and Pius was addressing a very different world. We have since seen a resurgent militant and fundamentalistic Islam, while the example Pius gives of the most “overpopulated” country in the world, Japan, had a population density at the time of 246 people per square km. England’s population density today is nearly double that, at 434 per square km squared.

As immigration remains at the forefront of policy and the news (and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future), we would do well to heed Cardinal Sarah and Pope Pius XII, men of profound thought who represent and are part of the inheritance that built Europe up from the ashes of the fallen Western Roman Empire.

At the same time, we should bear in mind the example of the Church that has always warmly welcomed migrants and demanded their just and hospitable treatment, while at the same time she “has also zealously integrated them into this new social system, for she is ever careful to warn of the dangers that threaten society, morality, and religion”.

And when it comes to the people traffickers and careless politicians who seem more concerned with satisfying economic demands than anything else, we should remember the following words of Pope Pius XII:

“It [is] necessary to combat the evil work of those perverse men who, alas, associated with migrants under the pretext of bringing material aid, but with the intent of damaging their souls.”

This article first appeared HERE.