By Robert Royal
Offering advice to a Pope is presumptuous—for anyone. However, in the Church of synodality, where everyone is supposed to have a voice—and be heard—, it may not be as presumptuous as it once was. Even so, that advice should be offered in a spirit of loyalty and concern, as a kind of aide-mémoire, in the classic diplomatic sense of providing a leader with information and analysis. Not on dogmas, Creeds, or long-settled issues that any Pope should already know. But as help in understanding how things stand—important things—, of which a pontiff may not be fully aware, conditioned as he is by what the French elegantly call a déformation professionnelle, and what we more technology-inclined Americans consider an “information silo.”
So let me undertake this diplomatic task, only as a personal exercise (as if I had been asked), something made more complicated by the fact that Pope Leo is American and has lived abroad for much of his adult life. And perhaps perceives—or perhaps not—what I am about to say.
I begin with the recent controversy over the relationship between Europe and the United States, because it is about much more than politics—and it is revealing—. I fully agree with the Pope’s recent statements that the Transatlantic Alliance is of utmost importance. And I concur that some of the ways the Trump Administration has formulated its recent National Security Strategy (National Security Strategy, NSS) could give an uncomprehending or hasty reader the impression that the United States is about to abandon Europe.
But this would overlook a deeper commitment to Europe, indeed to something cultural and—dare we say it?—religious, far more important than the political, economic, and military policies that come and go. As the NSS states at the beginning of a section titled “What Do We Want”: “We want to support our allies in preserving Europe’s freedom and security, while restoring Europe’s civilizational confidence and Western identity.” (Emphasis added). And thus, what the NSS seeks to promote, as well as to warn about, is—rightly understood—something the Roman Pontiff himself should care about. Deeply.
When the NSS criticizes “Europe,” it refers mostly to the progressive and irresponsible European Commission, which is the true decision-making body of the European Union. The EU is an organism developed over decades after the disaster of World War II, in the hope of banishing such intra-European destruction forever. And for a long time, to a great extent, it succeeded, thanks to the influence of three heroic Catholic figures: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy (the latter two currently in the process of formal canonization, not only for their political contributions but for the holiness of their lives).
And behind all of them stood the Christian Democracy elaborated by the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who unmasked and refuted the antihuman principles of the 20th-century totalitarianism—communism, fascism, and Nazism. And who also sought to make clear something that has now become painfully evident: that even Western “democracies” fail if they do not recognize their dependence on a Christian vision of the human person and society.
Christian Democracy, as an organized political movement, has gone the way of all flesh since the disappearance of the Soviet Union. But in its time, it was an important bulwark in keeping communism out of Italy, France, and even parts of Latin America. It even contributed behind the scenes to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights through various actors.
However, the world has moved on, and today only a very idealistic Christian would consider the UN or the EU as embodiments of a Christian vision or even a classic secular understanding of human affairs. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. And there are no future saints among its current leaders.
All of this is of deadly seriousness—and yet it has been mostly absent from public discourse—until JD Vance’s speech in Munich and now the NSS. As a British commentator noted (there are good reasons why the United Kingdom opted for Brexit), the current EU—that is, again, the EU’s globalist bureaucracy, not the European nations themselves—operates as if run by the terminally woke U.S. National Public Radio.
Its pieties are neither Christian nor classical. The old ways privileged the family as the first cell of society, subsidiarity and localism, a robust solidarity that is not expressed solely through the State (a one-sided approach that historically carries the risk of a “soft tyranny”). Instead, the EU has become an engine of toxic novelties like the LGBT agenda, even trying to impose it on member countries whose sovereignty is guaranteed by subsidiarity in the European charter and where democratic majorities have repeatedly rejected it.
And then there is the issue of mass immigration. Much of Europe is now waking up to the imprudence of admitting millions of Muslims whose culture cannot be reconciled with Western customs. In fact, as uncomfortable as it is to say in nations where religious pluralism was expected to flourish for all, Islam itself is, in a broad historical perspective and with all necessary qualifications, a threat to Western ways of life. The question of relations with Islam cannot be resolved simply by repeating the false mantra that it is a “religion of peace.” It is, but only after conversion, conquest, or submission.
The Pope, like his predecessor, has a special sensitivity toward migrants. Both have even promoted a new title for the Virgin Mary: Consolation of Migrants. But compassion must not degenerate into sentimentality. And especially in Europe, which was invaded and threatened by Islam for more than a thousand years, history matters.
And yet, the European Commission, which is neither transparent nor responsive to democratic pressures, tries to present opposition to woke pieties or defense of national cultures as threats to democracy and rejections of common European values—populist reactions that have parallels in the United States. The NSS argues, convincingly, that the opposite is closer to the truth.
Pope Leo has also suggested that the “populism” rising today across Europe, from Ireland to Poland, from Sweden to Sicily, uses fear of Islam to oppose immigration. One can appreciate his desire to protect vulnerable people fleeing evil regimes. But this is precisely backward. People fear Islamic immigration for good reasons. Few fear immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, or India.
It is the presence of millions—often militant Islamists—along with the Bataclan massacres in Paris and Charlie Hebdo, the martyrdoms of Christians in European churches, those same churches set on fire (two per month in France), attacks on Christmas markets, grenade attacks in Stockholm, stabbings and rapes in Germany and the United Kingdom, the 2,000 documented anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe alone in 2024. And there is the cowardice of conventional European politicians—Paris just canceled its New Year’s celebrations for “security reasons”—which has transformed ordinary people, willing to live and let live, into staunch opponents of new assaults on their cultures and their own lives.
The United States is right to wonder in the NSS whether the EU bureaucracy, as currently constituted, or certain European countries, if they continue yielding to internal Muslim pressures, will remain reliable allies. It is no secret to anyone who travels frequently in Europe today that, in private, one hears all sorts of things, even from conventional liberals, but they fear speaking publicly. Several European governments now accuse citizens of “hate speech” or creating “community tensions” for simply saying what everyone knows.
Pope Leo has taken a firm stand against what he has called “false mercy” in the indiscriminate granting of marriage annulments. But there are other forms of that same impulse that have taken hold in the Church, especially the belief that “dialogue” and openness are remedies for everything. They are not, not even within the Church, as anyone with eyes can see in the endless self-referentiality of the synodal way.
And outside, reality confronts us. Venezuela has become a crossroads for regime-sponsored criminality—drugs, human trafficking, repression, attacks on the Church. And all of this along with hosting Russian, Iranian, and Chinese agents, terrorists linked to Hamas and Hezbollah, as noted by Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado, a brave Catholic woman. Is “dialogue” really an effective stance against such malefactors? Machado doesn’t think so; hence her support for U.S. pressure.
All of this points to the need for a different aggiornamento in the Church—and for a more robust Catholicism. It is good to worry about possible future dangers of artificial intelligence or the environment. But there are present dangers that cannot be addressed by clinging to an obsolete globalist vision of openness and tolerance toward many things that seemed plausible in the 1990s and early 2000s, but which are no longer tolerable.
Something like a great turning point is occurring in our world, though its shape is not yet clear. But it is a spiritual turn as well as a worldly one. And the Church—and especially a Pope—should be fully aware of it. And in the rare occasions when a Pope must speak on temporal matters, lead it.
About the Author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West y A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.