Catholic writer urges Church to protect faithful after Ceuta migrant surge

Catholic writer Francis Maier argued that the Church should balance its support for migrants with concern for the safety and future of local Catholics to ensure the Church’s continued presence in Europe.

In an Aug. 10 op-ed for The Catholic Thing, Maier, a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, highlighted a recent surge of migrants into Ceuta, a Spanish autonomous city on the North African coast. 

Maier reported that in July, about 60,000 migrants — most of whom were likely young Muslim men — crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, overwhelming the border and throwing the city into chaos. 

Many entered by swimming around the border fence or forcing their way through checkpoints. At least 57 people died by drowning or in stampedes, according to AP News. The outlet reported that the number of arrivals was equivalent to roughly 70% of Ceuta’s population. Spain deployed soldiers and additional police officers, while about 48,300 migrants returned to Morocco shortly afterward, AP News reported.

The unprecedented surge renewed debate over European immigration policy and the Catholic leaders’ responses to mass migration. Maier characterized the Spanish Church’s reaction as an “ambiguous mix” of concern for the law, concern for Ceuta’s legal residents, and a strong desire to prevent the incident from being used to demonize migrants.

While affirming the Church’s work on behalf of migrants, Maier argued that Catholic leaders must also confront what he described as the religious and cultural consequences of large-scale migration from predominantly Muslim countries. 

“One of Christianity’s great strengths is its respect for the dignity of every human person, religious or otherwise, as a child of God,” Maier wrote. “The Church serves that dignity with exceptional skill in her support for migrants. This is an essential part of our faith.”

He added, however, that the Church, like a family, has “its first obligations not to strangers but to its own members’ health, safety, and future. Otherwise the family ensures its own extinction.”

Maier grounded his warning in the writings of Jacques Ellul, a 20th-century French Calvinist philosopher who helped Jews escape the pro-Nazi Vichy regime during World War II. Ellul later wrote about the historical treatment of “dhimmis,” or non-Muslims living under Islamic rule.

Ellul argued that Christianity and Islam have fundamentally different understandings of God, the human person, Scripture, and religious authority — differences that Maier said carry “very practical, real-world consequences.” 

“We live in a moment when Europe’s elites have repudiated the continent’s Christian past, while revising history to soften and valorize many elements of Islam,” Maier wrote. “Christian thinkers, meanwhile, often minimize the gulfs that separate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in a search for mutual respect.”

Maier wrote that Ellul identified an “irreformable totalitarian streak” within Islam, rooted in a “claimed divine right.” According to Maier, Ellul believed this tendency led Islam to introduce the concept of “holy war” into religious thought, prompting Christianity to develop the notion of “crusade” in response.

“For Islam, violence and coercion — when seen as necessary — are legitimate tools in spreading the faith,” Maier said. “They’re hardwired into Islam’s original structure in a way completely alien to Christianity.”  

According to Maier’s account of Ellul’s thought, although Jews and Christians under Muslim rule were traditionally regarded as protected religious communities, they did not possess rights equal to those of Muslims in practice. Their protections were historically conditional and subject to revocation by Islamic rulers. 

Maier quoted Ellul as writing that “massacres of dhimmis” in past centuries were frequent and argued that persecution of Christians continues in some Muslim communities today. 

“The long-term effect of this repression is slow strangulation of all things non-Muslim,” he wrote, saying that before Muslim conquest, the North African Catholic Church had about 300 dioceses, which are now “buried and forgotten in the sand.” 

Drawing on Ellul’s work, Maier argued that Europe could gradually place its Christian population in a comparable position if it accepted mass immigration without acknowledging the differences between Christianity and Islam. 

“The Europe of today, with its delusions about the nature of Islam and its moral and cultural paralysis in the face of mass Muslim immigration, is sleepwalking itself into voluntary ‘dhimmitude,’” he wrote.

Maier concluded that the Church should continue defending the dignity of migrants while showing greater concern for Catholics who bear the social and economic consequences of immigration. 

“When the Church allows herself to be seen as more concerned with strangers of alien (and historically resistant and unfriendly) faith than with the needs of her own people — the people who will bear the cost of unrestrained immigration — she colludes in her own disappearance,” Maier argued.

“It’s happened before,” he concluded. “It can happen again. And that serves no one.”