The Madrid daily El País reports that Pope Leo XIV told the Spanish Catholic bishops that his biggest concern about Spain is the influence of the ‘far right’ party Vox on migration issues. According to the newspaper (this English translation is from Google Translate):
‘The Pope surprised them by making his priorities clear and getting straight to the point: he said that his greatest concern in Spain at this time “is the far-right ideology”, according to two sources familiar with the meeting who spoke to El País. During the meeting, the Pontiff warned the Spanish prelates about the rise of these political groups and how they “seek to win the Catholic vote” and “manipulate the Church”, the same sources reported. This message has since set the course the Pope wants the Spanish episcopate to follow in the face of the rhetoric of parties like Vox and ultraconservative groups against the acceptance and regularization of immigrants.’
This could be fake news. The website InfoVaticana quotes anonymous sources who, they say, were also at the meeting, and who report that the Holy Father did not make ‘far-right ideology’ a focus of the meeting. One hopes they are correct. Nevertheless, there is no doubt where Pope Leo stands on mass migration: he’s all for it. The first American pope has refused to visit his homeland during this, its 250th anniversary year, and is instead traveling to Lampedusa, the main intake point for illegal migrants to Italy, on the Fourth of July.
What makes Vox ‘far right’? It is against mass migration and fights for the kinds of traditional social values that one would expect the Catholic Church to support (e.g., against gender ideology). Supporters of nationalist parties in Europe are accustomed to the media using a term that one associates with fascists, but it is depressing to see news that the pope might be falling into the same trap.
The Spanish government is perhaps the farthest left in all of Europe. Led by Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish government legalized euthanasia, liberalized abortion laws, and promoted transgenderism and gender ideology—all serious violations of Catholic teaching. But if the El País report is correct, then to Pope Leo, Vox is the greater threat, because of its hardline stance on migration. Even if El País got some details wrong, the fact that Leo neglects all the objectively pro-Catholic policies of the Trump administration—including its rollback of gender ideology and pro-life stance—because he objects to Trump’s attempts to protect the sovereignty of America’s borders, tells us where the Holy Father’s heart is.
The Sánchez government, with the full support of the country’s Catholic hierarchy, has recently announced a plan to grant amnesty to 500,000 illegal migrants and asylum seekers living in Spain. This does not grant them citizenship, but puts them on a path to it. There are no fully reliable numbers on the number of illegal migrants living in Spain, but some estimates say it could be as high as 800,000. They will all be amnestied under the government’s plan—with no parliamentary debate.
‘Tells us where the Holy Father’s heart is’
To be fair, most of them come from Latin America and should have little problem integrating into Spanish life. To critics, though, that is beside the point. Wherever the illegal migrants come from, the Spanish government is regularizing their immigration status without parliamentary debate. So much for democracy.
This is why it is so important for European Union countries like Hungary to hold the line against mass migration, despite having to pay a heavy price from Brussels bureaucrats for their determination. The ruling class, both in Brussels and in power in most EU nations, is using every weapon in its arsenal to cast into the political darkness Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, because leaders like him are obstacles to what has been legitimately called the ‘Great Replacement’ of European peoples.
In fact, even to cite the Great Replacement, a theory that is empirically supported, is to earn the contempt of European media. If you notice what’s happening and say something, they call you a racist and a conspiracy theorist. One thinks of Galileo, who repented under Church duress of his claim that the earth revolved around the sun. The persecuted scientist supposedly said to his inquisitors after his forced recantation: ‘And yet, it moves.’
Europeans scarcely grasp the magnitude of how Brussels and its allies are manipulating regulatory control of the media, including social media, to achieve their goals. A blockbuster book coming out in March from the US journalist Jacob Siegel, The Information State: Politics IN The Age of Total Control, documents in shocking detail how the US Government quietly worked to deceive the American people by controlling their access to information.
He bases the book on his much-read 2023 essay about disinformation. In that piece, Siegel wrote of the way supposedly liberal democratic states are becoming digital dictatorships.
‘A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals,’ Siegel wrote at the time, ‘is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.’
In his new book, Siegel expands on his original thesis:
‘What I call the information state refers to a form of government that replaces the democratic principle of consent with control. Most of us are familiar with the distinction between authoritarian regimes that impose their will by force and democracies that govern through the consent of their citizens. The information state represents a third form of political regime. It governs by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena, which it uses to engineer the public’s compliance with its programs. Such a state rules by monopolizing attention.’
It’s not just America. This is what Brussels and its allies are doing now in an attempt to unseat Viktor Orbán. They will do and have been doing the same thing to any nationalist politician or party threatening their illiberal progressive technocracy.
For example, a German court recently ordered X to hand over data related to the current Hungarian election campaign. Elon Musk, the owner of X, is resisting this order in court. It is a test case for the strength of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which allegedly exists to fight ‘disinformation’ and ‘election manipulation’. Only a fool believes this is what the DSA is really for. The EU defines ‘disinformation’ as information that contradicts its preferred narrative, and ‘election manipulation’ as what Russians do to affect the outcome of European elections; if EU technocrats and their allies attempt to manipulate elections, that’s called ‘defending democracy’. Hungarian MEP András László called out this undemocratic scheme in a powerful January speech in the European Parliament.
What does this have to do with mass migration? Keeping Europe’s borders effectively open to so-called ‘asylum seekers’ is a top Brussels priority. It is also a priority with many Western European governments, like Spain’s. And it is a priority for Europe’s liberal media, and liberals within non-government institutions—like, astonishingly, the Catholic Church.
Why ‘astonishingly’? Because mass migration from Islamic countries threatens to erase Europe’s Christian identity—and the Catholic Church, the institution most responsible for guarding it, is collaborating with those secular institutions, like the EU, that actively try to erase the remnants of Christian civilization.
This is not a conspiracy theory. Take the current controversy in Vienna, where an ethnically Turkish city councilor from the Socialist Party is protesting against a plan to erect a monument to John III Sobieski, the Polish king who led the Christian armies that saved Vienna in 1683 from Ottoman conquest. Aslihan Bozatemur says: ‘There is no place in Vienna for a monument that promotes xenophobia, Islamophobia, or anti-Turkish sentiment.’
If not for John Sobieski’s leadership, Vienna would likely have fallen to the armies of Islam—and European history would have been very different. After their 1683 defeat, Islamic militants never again threatened Europe—until the present era, when they are slowly taking over by manipulation of left-wing politicians, media, NGOs, and the sentimental humanitarianism of churchmen, to achieve what their ancestors could not do by force of arms.
It is to be hoped that the El País report about Pope Leo’s words to the Spanish bishops was fake news leaked by manipulative liberals within the Spanish church, in collaboration with a leftist, pro-migrant media outlet. The real question, though, is why the pope is not openly siding with Vox in the same way his predecessor, St. John Paul II, sided with Solidarity against the Communist dictatorship in Poland.
Politics alone will not save Christian Europe. Above all, that requires conversion, or re-conversion, of European peoples who have forgotten their baptism. But politics is necessary, if only to protect the conditions under which the Christian faith, flat on its back after at least a century of secularism, can recover. This is something Hungary’s Viktor Orbán understands, even if politicians in the other capital of the former Empire do not.
Orbán faces the ‘digital swarms’ of European technocrats, who, despite professing belief in liberal democracy, see their principal task as making sure people vote the ‘right’ way: for more EU control, and more migration. The Catholic Church and all churches that care about their own survival in a post-Christian, Islamizing Europe ought to wake up. Whether they realize it or not, they are on the wrong side of this cultural war—which is also a digital war.
Who is the John III Sobieski, who will come to the aid of European patriots at this critical hour? In part, he is Donald Trump, whose administration, once the victim of such digital sabotage, has announced plans to set up a US Government website, so that Europeans can read news and information that the censorious information tsars of Brussels hide from them. Who would have imagined that the 21st-century successor to Radio Free Europe, the American media institution that broadcast truthful news into the Communist bloc, would be deployed against the democracies of Europe?
In fact, Viktor Orbán and all other nationalist, migration-critical leaders follow in the footsteps of the great Polish king who saved Europe. The question remains, then: who is the Pope Innocent XI of our time? That Roman pontiff rallied the Holy League to defend Vienna; King John III Sobieski answered Innocent’s call to ride into battle to defend Christendom.
One sees no Innocent XI on the horizon. But surely somewhere, in a conservative seminary far from the centers of European power, and hated by many sitting bishops, a new Innocent is being formed. The faithful—even non-Catholic Christians like me—can only pray that he arrives before all is lost.
The views expressed by our guest authors are theirs and do not necessarily represent the views of Hungarian Conservative.
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