Feeding the hungry is a work of mercy. But for there to be a work of mercy, there must first be someone hungry. And here begins the misunderstanding that threatens to turn the Church—its dioceses, its Caritas organizations, its administrators—not into a Samaritan of a tragedy, but into a logistical piece of an invasion.
I. The facts: the reversible percentage
The more than fifty thousand people who have crossed into Ceuta are not shipwrecked, nor war-displaced, nor victims of any famine. They are people whose home, whose table, and whose pantry are ten or twenty kilometers from the place where they are now said to be starving.
What is going to happen next is no mystery and admits no rhetorical refuge in the unpredictable. It is a factual datum, documented in all previous episodes of mass entries: a percentage of those who jump, once they verify that there are no resources or short-term solution, desist and return. Not all, but a decisive percentage.
It is the elementary dynamic of any mass deployment without logistics: the lack of supply produces withdrawal. That reversible percentage is the only part of the crisis that resolves itself—without police charges, without forced returns, without human or political cost—and it is resolved with a single condition: that no one sets up the supply. That returning to a home a few kilometers away remains more reasonable than staying.
The hunger endured ten kilometers from one’s own table, with the return path open and free, is not the poverty of the Gospel. What is happening in Ceuta is not a humanitarian crisis: it is an invasion with unresolved logistics. And every invasion without supply fails. Always. From Xerxes to today, military history is, in large part, the history of supply.
II. The missing piece
At this precise point the ecclesial device is announced: food, drink, shelter. Structured, planned, budgeted, with a vocation for continuity.
That is, exactly the supply the operation lacks.
Let us say it plainly: that is not feeding the hungry. That is providing logistical cover for an invasion.
III. Liability: the theory of scarce goods
Article 28.b) of the Criminal Code considers as perpetrator—not mere accomplice: perpetrator, with the penalty of the perpetrator—whoever cooperates in the execution of the act “with an act without which it would not have been carried out.”
To distinguish necessary cooperation from complicity, jurisprudence decades ago adopted the theory of scarce goods: the necessary cooperator is the one who provides what the executor could not easily obtain by another route; the accomplice is the one who provides what is fungible, replaceable, what anyone would have given.
Is supply a scarce good in this scenario? It is the scarce good par excellence: its absence is producing—or will produce—the withdrawal of the reversible percentage, and no other actor has the territorial network, the means, the volunteers, and the social legitimacy to supply it at scale.
The interested parties themselves cannot obtain it. Whoever sets it up is not providing a sandwich: they are providing the condition of possibility for mass permanence. They are providing, in the terminology of the Supreme Court, the act without which the fact would not have been carried out.
That is, literally, the legal definition of the necessary cooperator.
IV. The subjective element: eventual intent and willful blindness
It will be said: the Church does not want the invasion.
Criminal Law does not require wanting the result: it is enough to know it and act. It is eventual intent, consolidated in our jurisprudence since the rapeseed oil case: whoever knows the concrete danger that their conduct generates and, despite that, carries it out, is liable under intent, not negligence.
And here the effect is not a remote risk: it is the announced, published, and statistically proven consequence of the deployment itself. It is known—because every precedent teaches it, because every border report says so, because it is elementary arithmetic—that supply coverage deactivates the withdrawal of the reversible percentage and sends the message to the other side of the border that logistics are resolved and paid for by the Church.
Faced with this, there is not even room for the refuge of “we did not know”: the Supreme Court has for years applied the doctrine of willful blindness, which denies the benefit of ignorance to those who voluntarily turn their backs on what anyone in their position would know.
A structured and planned device excludes, by definition, surprise. Naivety, when it is organizational, budgeted, and recurrent, ceases to be naivety: it is assumption of the result.
V. The humanitarian shield and its fine print
The reply will invoke article 318 bis, which punishes intentional assistance to illegal entry or transit and—with intent to profit—to permanence, but exempts assistance provided for “exclusively humanitarian” purposes, in line with Directive 2002/90/EC.
Three observations, none reassuring.
First: the exemption requires exclusivity of the humanitarian purpose. A device whose known and assumed effect is to consolidate mass irregular permanence and neutralize the only avenue of reversal does not pursue “exclusively” humanitarian purposes, no matter how much food it distributes: it pursues—or at least accepts—the maintenance of an unlawful situation.
Second: the entire architecture of the exemption rests, like the state of necessity in article 20.5, on a real and unprovoked necessity. The Code itself denies the defense to anyone who has intentionally caused their own situation of necessity. A “food emergency” protagonized by someone whose pantry is ten kilometers away and who has a free path to return to it is a self-provoked and voluntarily maintained necessity. The humanitarian clause protects the one who rescues the shipwrecked; it is not written for the one who refloats the boarding vessel.
Third: if the device is financed—as is usual—with subsidies, agreements, or public funds per person attended, the boundary with the intent to profit under article 318 bis.2 becomes uncomfortably porous. When assistance is paid for, altruism becomes a business model, and the business model requires that the crisis not be resolved. Let each entity do its own accounting before a prosecutor does it for them.
A massified invasion has only one non-traumatic exit: return. Return occurs, in the percentage that all experience confirms, when permanence lacks support. Permanence only acquires support if someone sets up the supply. Whoever sets it up sustains it; whoever sustains it knowing its effect cooperates; and whoever cooperates with the act without which the fact would not have been carried out has a technical name in the Criminal Code and a simpler one in history.
The Code calls it necessary cooperator. History will call it responsible. And the childish naivety of confusing an invasion with a famine does not figure, in either of the two courts, among the defenses.