Will Pope Leo stand up to Islam?

As Muslim migration roils Europe, some Catholic bishops are starting to notice.

“For decades, the Islamization of Europe has been progressing through mass immigration,” Polish Bishop Antoni Długosz said July 13, adding that illegal immigrants “create serious problems in the countries they arrive in.”

Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan spoke more bluntly in March: “We’re witnessing an invasion. They are not refugees. This is an invasion, a mass Islamization of Europe.”

Yet Pope Leo XIV lives in a different dimension. “In a world darkened by war and injustice . . . migrants and refugees stand as messengers of hope,” Leo said July 25. “Their courage and tenacity bear heroic testimony to a faith that sees beyond what our eyes can see and gives them the strength to defy death on the various contemporary migration routes.”

Leo’s comments express more than blissful sentimentality. They reveal the Vatican’s role in encouraging open borders and exempting migrants from accountability. In Europe’s case, that involves deliberate blindness to the violent, totalitarian nature of Islam and many of its followers. 

This Catholic approach toward Islam reflects the ideas ofLouis Massignon, a French scholar from the early 20th century. Massignon described Islam as “the faith of Abraham revived with Muhammad,” and asserted that Muslims “have the right to equality among the monotheisms descended from Abraham.”

French Catholic scholar Alain Besançon described the results.

“An entire literature favorable to Islam has grown up in Europe, much of it the work of Catholic priests under the sway of Massignon’s ideas,” he wrote. Besançon attributed that posture to “an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements,” a dissatisfaction that the Vatican embodies.

“Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe,” Massignon’s advocates “cannot but admire Muslim devoutness,” Besançon wrote. “Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than to believe in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do.”

The Catholic Church officially embraced Massignon’s ideas at the Second Vatican Council in two documents. One, Nostra Aetate, focused on the church’s relationship with Judaism but additionally addressed Islam:

“The Church regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God . . . they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.”

The other, Lumen Gentium, declared that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these there are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God.”

That passage made the Catholic catechism.

But what Besançon called “indulgent ecumenicism” toward Islam goes beyond words. During John Paul II’s papacy, the church embraced outright appeasement.

Catholic bishops sold underutilized churches and schools to Muslim groups; many of the churches became mosques. In October 2006, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy (UCOII) build a mosque in Genoa next to a monastery. The friars even helped build the mosque’s foundation.

But the UCOII – affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood – advocates “an extremist version of the Quran, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule,” Magdi Allam, a convert to Catholicism from Islam, reported for Milan’s Corriere della Sera.

In 2006, the group also demanded Islamic schools, banks and clerical review of textbooks. Its president, Mohamed Nour Dachan, refused to sign a document pledging Muslims to accept Italy’s constitution, denounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Seven months earlier, a Vatican cardinal even suggested that Muslim students receive Islamic religious instruction in the hour reserved for Catholic instruction in Italian schools.

“If there are 100 Muslim children in a school, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught their religion,” said the late Cardinal Renato Martino, then the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. “If we said ‘no’ until we saw equivalent treatment for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries, I would say that we were placing ourselves on their level.”

In 2008, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales asked Catholic schools to reserve prayer rooms for Muslim students and to adapt bathroom facilities for ritual cleansing before prayer. But the worst example of appeasement took place in Belgium.

As part of a campaign to force the government to grant amnesty, Belgium’s Catholic bishops turned their churches into homes for Muslim migrants, making them squatters. In May 2006, more than 30 Belgian churches served such a purpose. About 300 Africans occupied Antwerp’s Magdalena Chapel. Other churches held as many as 700 squatters.

At Our Lady of Succor Church in Brussels, squatters lived in small tents donated by Catholic relief agencies, conducted Muslim services, erected computer tables near the pulpit and even set fires on the floor.

Friar Herwig Arts described a scene at Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel: migrants “removed the tabernacle [and] installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass.” He went on, “For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore.” 

Belgium’s bishops were not amused. Arts was chided by Belgium’s leading clergy. “Solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own nation, said the late Cardinal Godfried Danneels, then the country’s leading prelate. Monsingor Luc van Looy, then the bishop of Ghent, even said “illegal fugitives” were “entitled to a good place in our society. Arts has been silent on the topic ever since.

But two decades later, Kazakhstan’s Bishop Schneider refuses to stay silent: “This is a global political agenda by the powerful of the world to destroy Europe.”

Leo thus faces an existential challenge, one that blissful sentimentality cannot answer: Will he allow a church that played a pivotal role in creating European civilization to perform a more decisive part in destroying it?