A Lot Less Pope Leo, Please, and a Lot More St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas

A German Catholic priest says that being against mass migration is “un-Christian”: “German priest says populist party isn’t ‘Christian’ for opposing migration,” by Antonino Cambria, Lifesite News, September 1, 2026:

“The AfD invokes Christianity as a culture but opposes the churches: (The AfD) want the Christian label. But not the Caritas that takes in strangers. Not the church that stands up for the dignity of every single person,” Jüsten claimed. “Anyone who limits the church to worship alone and disputes its active charity has failed to understand the essence of the church.”…

Should Christians stand up for the “dignity” of Muslim gang rapists? Or for the dignity of Muslim thieves, drug traffickers, arsonists who set churches on fire, or those who attack Jews on the streets of Germany? Everyone is presumed to be entitled to be treated with dignity, but only up to a point. If their actions are horrific, then they lose that presumption.

Fr. Jüsten fails to note that part of Catholic social teaching is that a country “has a right to secure its borders.” That means it has no obligation to admit others, and if it does admit them, it has a right to choose which immigrants it will allow in, based on information about how a particular group of immigrants has behaved in that country in the past, or how they have behaved in other places where they have been admitted. There is now plenty of evidence — the kind that Fr. Jüsten wants German Catholics to ignore — that Muslims around Europe have not contributed anything of value to society, but have instead insisted on being supported by the various welfare states. If that evidence leads German Catholics to reject the admission of more Muslims, that is perfectly sensible.

Per the ordo amoris laid out by Doctors of the Church such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, there is also “a hierarchy of charity,” in which one must take care of one’s own family and nation before caring for foreigners.

This makes sense. It is the nature of humans to wish in the first place for the wellbeing of one’s own — a hierarchy that proceeds downward from one’s immediate family, to one’s extended family, to the nation-state to which one belongs, to the civilization of which that nation-state is a part, and finally, a most etiolated attachment to humanity as a whole. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine both recognized that there were naturally decreasing levels of empathy as the affected population increased — we naturally worry more about our own families than we do about the country that we live in — and that “hierarchy of charity” cannot be gainsaid. We ought forthrightly to recognize this fact. Fr. Jüsten and his open-borders ilk in Germany see no reason for such a hierarchy; in fact, in their insensate support for migrants, they set those migrants’ demands above the needs of the indigenous Germans to prevent their country from becoming Islamized.

All over Europe, open-borders Christians like Fr. Jüsten, who see no reason to halt Muslim immigration into Europe, are losing the battle in that famous court of public opinion. Muslims moving into Europe over the past few decades in such large numbers — there are now 44 million Muslims in the Continent — have led to an intolerable situation. Crime rates have shot up. The percentage of convicted criminals who are Muslim is many times the percentage of Muslims in the general population. Their criminality is across the board, from crimes of property — street robberies, house burglaries, drug trafficking, shoplifting — to crimes of violence, including a huge rise in the number of rapes and other sexual assaults, and even murder. In addition, Muslims on the dole cost German taxpayers 36 billion euros last year, and these huge expenditures are a source of rage for many Germans.

Increasing numbers of Germans now want the AfD to win, precisely in order to impose strict limits on Muslim immigrants, and to begin the practice of what is called “remigration” — that is, the deportation of Muslim criminals, and of those Muslims who refuse to work or refuse to make the slightest effort to integrate into the larger society, back to their countries of origin.

A lot less Pope Leo, please, and a lot more St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, would do the Catholic Church, and the civilization of which it is a part, a world of good.