Coming soon to a European country

In Strasbourg last week, Your Holiness criticised the immigration policy of the European nations, reminding us that more than 3,200 refugees from North Africa have died trying to reach Europe this year alone. You said: “We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast cemetery. The boats landing daily on the shores of Europe are filled with men and women who need acceptance and assistance." You condemned Europe for policies which "contribute to slave labour and continuing social tensions.”

You then called for a "united response" to create the jobs to help immigrants build a life on the continent. You asked for "fair, courageous and realistic policies" towards the migrants' countries of origin, saying that these policies should be aimed at helping resolve the conflicts that cause immigration, "rather than adopting policies motivated by self-interest, which increase and feed such conflicts." You concluded, “Europe seems to give the impression of being somewhat elderly and haggard, feeling less and less a protagonist in a world which frequently regards it with aloofness.”

But you underestimate Europe’s difficulties. Since 2008, the continent has been going through a deep economic trough and unemployment rates are high everywhere; in some countries it is as much as 25 per cent, with the proportion of the young jobless as high as 60 per cent. Wages everywhere are low. These conditions already produce the “social tensions” of which you speak, even without the relentless arrival of many thousands more on our shores and across our porous borders. To offer the welcome you suggest to yet more immigrants will only greatly exacerbate these tensions and, as many commentators have said, provoke unrest and violent confrontation.

And that is only the beginning of Europe’s problems, which are by no means of recent origin. The immigrants are representatives of the Muslim ideology while, as Your Holiness understands more than anyone else, Europe is the creation of Christianity, for which radical Muslims have no regard. And indeed Muslims are dispossessing, persecuting and murdering Christians in very large numbers throughout the Islamic world from West Africa to Pakistan.

The history of the last 1400 years is of a succession of Muslim insurgencies, Islamic imperialism, the latest of which is the cause of our current geo-political difficulties.

In AD 732, a Muslim army of as many as 200,000 men was defeated by the Christian Charles Martel at Tours. If that battle had been lost, all Europe would have fallen to militant Islam. In 1565 the relief of the Siege of Malta, by a Christian alliance, ensured that the Mediterranean did not fall into Muslim hands and so give them a toehold in southern Europe. Then came the Battle of Lepanto on 7th October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Spain, the Republics of Venice and Genoa and the Papacy defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire.

There was that other September 11 – 1683 when Christian armies under Jan Sobieski arrived at the gates of Vienna and defeated the last substantial Muslim incursion: the last, that is, before the one which we face at present. There is no doubt that militant Islam’s current aggression will have to be firmly suppressed if the character of Europe is to survive. If the European powers cannot bring themselves to act firmly, then the continent will be dominated by the Islamic ideology within a generation, with the resulting loss of all our freedoms – and of course the loss of countless lives.

If Europe does not find the will to resist, then the nightmare that is Syria and Iraq today will be ours tomorrow.