U.S. historian Raymond Ibrahim argues that Europe’s crisis of Muslim migration has less to do with Islam than with a West that has lost the will — and the faith — to defend itself.
Mass migration has become one of the defining flashpoints of Western politics, from the United States to Europe. For three decades, the Catholic Church has tried to bring moral clarity to the question, with each pope shaping that response through his own background and theological sensibility. Pope Leo, infused with his longtime experience as a missionary in Latin America, has repeatedly pressed the Trump administration over its treatment of migrants, suggesting that opposing abortion while supporting harsh deportation policy is not, in fact, a pro-life position.
That universal moral framework, however, encounters a particularly complex reality in Europe, where migration is overwhelmingly Muslim and where a long history of conflict with Islam still shapes political debate. Many European Catholics often feel torn between a desire to defend a culture and a faith they see eroding and a Church whose leadership has consistently called for welcome and mercy toward migrants regardless of origin and religion.
Few people have spent as long studying those relations as
