“Globalism has already failed” and the crisis of predominantly Muslim migration is leading to a point of “no return”, Bishop Marian Eleganti has declared.
The former auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Chur is one of a handful of prelates who publicly denounces Islam and the concept of modern migration into the West, and has regularly linked the demographic crisis in the West to the crisis of immigration simultaneously affecting Europe.
Interviewed recently by La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, Eleganti warned that the Catholic Church “should not take an idealistic approach on this issue”, outlining that this meant the Church should avoid preaching “a moralism detached from reality, which ignores the concretely existing social problems linked to unlimited immigration and which can only be solved with political common sense.”
“The ecclesial project of universal brotherhood does not combine truth and love,” he said.
Eleganti has issued such a commentary before, as he previously criticized the style of fraternity born out of Pope Francis’ 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti as being “unrealistic”. “What kind of brotherhood is there, for example, between Christianity and Islam, which persecutes or suppresses the Christian faith in most countries where it prevails?,” he wrote last year.
For Eleganti, focussing on such a programme has harmed the Church, which in his assessment now pays “too much attention to the world.”
“Under the pontificate of Pope Francis this alliance with the political world was taken to the extreme,” he told La Bussola. The bishop opined that the entire process of globalism has “already failed today with respect to people’s needs” since it only serves the “financial elite”, namely those who “determine the policy”.
Due to the current style of pro-immigration rhetoric which has emerged from the Vatican over the past number of years, Eleganti argued that the Church – or the Vatican – “does not want to see things as they are”.
Charity and love for neighbours must “manifest itself in a reasonable way”, he noted. “A father who wants to help orphaned children and already has two of his own must consider whether he can afford to adopt another child.”
Eleganti’s reference to the Ordo Amoris, or the priority of charity, will not be lost on Vatican analysts. It was in response to U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s comments on the same topic that Pope Francis issued a letter to the U.S. episcopate critiquing Vance and President Trump’s immigration policy. Francis decried the equating of the “illegal status of some migrants with criminality” in comments that garnered strong criticism from the Trump administration.
But in Eleganti’s assessment, the West is too readily accepting high levels of Muslim immigration due to a low birth rate. Western nations are compensating their lack of children “with immigrants to survive as a society”, he said.
“The danger is very serious,” Eleganti warned. “Hatred and arrogance, the thirst for power and violence, in other words: submission, are clearly demonic phenomena.”
He further argued that unless swift action is taken to counter the rising spread of Islam in the West then “the point of no return will be reached, at least in some regions of the Western world. Riots like those occurring in England are omens of this.”
Islam is not alone in posing a threat to Western civilisation, in Eleganti’s assessment. It is also joined in that regard by neo-Enlightenment modernism. “What they have in common is an anti-Christian spearhead,” he said.
Urging prayer also as a recourse against this double-pronged attack, Eleganti related that the crisis affecting the West is “something supernatural: on the one hand, the Incarnation of God and the revelation of the truth; on the other, the constant and ever-new Luciferian inventions that seduce men.”
He also rejected the repeated drafting of new texts as a proposed solution to the various problems affecting Western society. The Church, Eleganti said, does “not need ever-new documents on this” since “the Gospel contains all the answers. At the end of the day, things are simple. An excess of words and complexity is not an indication of a divine solution. Our solution is Jesus.”
Eleganti was among the few bishops who publicly condemned the Vatican’s accommodating of Muslims in the Vatican Library last year, when news spread about a small room with a carpet which had been made available to Muslim scholars at their request.
Interviewed by this correspondent last year, Eleganti expressed his doubts about fruitful dialogue between Catholicism and Islam. “I think even in its foundation Islam is expressed as an anti-Christian religion,” he said. “It says the contrary. It says that Jesus is not the son of God and that He is just a prophet, a human being, and it denies the Holy Trinity, of course.”
Though one of a small number to make such strident comments, Eleganti is not alone. The Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad also issued similar words to the West about Islam, shortly after the ISIS attacks on the Christian population in his native Nineveh Plains. “You need to rethink our reality in the Middle East because you are welcoming an ever-increasing number of Muslims into your countries. You, too, are at risk,” warned then Archeparch Nona.
He continued: “You must make strong and courageous decisions, even if it means contradicting your own principles. You think that all people are equal, but that’s not true. Islam does not say that all people are equal. Your values are not their values. If you don’t understand this in time, you will become victims of the enemy you have welcomed into your own homes.”
Michael Haynes is an English journalist in the Holy See Press Corps. He serves as Vatican Correspondent for the Catholic Herald, while readers can follow him at Per Mariam and on X @MLJHaynes.
