Pope Leo, Lampedusa, and The Camp of the Saints

On his native country’s 250th anniversary, Pope Leo XIV will visit Lampedusa, an Italian sovereign territory off the North African coast that has long been a destination for migrants seeking to enter Europe. In 2013, Pope Francis made it his first papal destination outside Rome. Publication of Pope Leo’s official calendar recalled Vice President JD Vance’s personal invitation to the United States for the anniversary festivities, an invitation the pope seems to have declined. Adding fuel to the fire, unconfirmed Spanish media reports soon thereafter claimed that Pope Leo “warned the [Spanish] bishops that his greatest concern in Spain is the far right that is trying to ‘instrumentalize the Church.’”

To be sure, any conceivable U.S. administration in this political climate would make such an anniversary uncomfortable for a pope—even more so now than when the Vatican released this schedule a couple weeks ago. Pope Leo is probably wise to skip the transatlantic voyage in July. The Lampedusa symbolism, though, is unmistakable as it is deeply misplaced. It also has sparked comparisons to French Catholic writer Jean Raspail’s dystopian 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.

The novel describes a grotesque armada of one million migrants from the Ganges that sails to the French Riviera. It is a searing indictment of the Western cultural institutions that have grown too nihilistic and narcissistic to perpetuate their civilization. Among the characters is a South American pope more concerned with social justice PR stunts than shepherding the Church. (Interestingly, this “red bishop of Bahia” is named Benedict XVI: “It goes without saying that the pope mentioned in this fictional account is in no way to be taken for Our Very Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, to whom I pledge my trust and my respect,” clarified Raspail in 2006.) “He was a pope in tune with the times, and this was much appreciated by the media,” asserts Raspail’s narrator.

Far from being in tune with the times, though, Pope Leo’s Lampedusian symbolism is decidedly retrograde. As mass migration to Europe has proceeded steadily since Raspail’s time and surged to unfathomable levels since Pope Francis’s 2013 Lampedusa visit, the phenomenon’s beneficiaries and victims are clearly established.

The peoples of Europe are incontrovertibly poorer from this industrial-scale displacement. Even a decade ago, this was evident just a short walk from the Vatican walls, outside the Termini railway station, within the modern-day catacombs of the Rome Metro, or near the steadily degrading tourist destinations. By that time, the Ostiense district, home of the Papal Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, had acquired an unsettlingly non-European character. With each passing year, these lagging indicators of everyday life have noticeably worsened. Recent Roman crime news has included a government official suffering a near-fatal migrant gang attack outside Termini Station, a young woman being gang raped by a trio of Gambian men, and a teenager being gang raped by three Moroccan men. Rome’s women can reminisce about the days of Italian men cat-calling them on the city’s picturesque streets. The Eternal City buckles under the weight of the Third World.

Nor is the Third World thriving when it arrives. Contrary to myth, the desperately poor generally do not migrate to Europe, nor do women and children. When young, reasonably mobile men pay off their smuggling debts and arrive in Europe’s decaying suburbs, they are unlikely to find material or spiritual fulfillment. Menial work like food delivery often represents a best-case scenario, with government handouts, petty crime, and gang activity also on offer. Swelling diasporas and active NGOs limit the need for assimilation, which vast cultural distances hinder in any case. Last summer, one border guard told me some Afghan border crossers admitted journeying to Europe to seek “blonde women and money from the wall,” with the latter referring to ATMs. Just as Europe suffers from this influx of unassimilable military-age men, source countries are uprooted by losing them. 

Nor is the battlefield contained to the ‘legacy’ migration regions of Western Europe. Catholic heavyweights Poland and Croatia are grappling with migration issues for the first time. An Islamic group in Kraków is fundraising to build a new mosque within a housing estate as Muslim activism becomes bolder in cities across the country. Types of crime and antisocial behavior that were previously nonexistent have become distressingly common. Likewise in Croatia, where the government has welcomed unprecedented waves of unskilled laborers and housed new arrivals in a Zagreb hostel near a school, despite the illegality of this arrangement. Even far-flung Iceland has become a migration country practically overnight.

Who benefits, then, when the Vatican—and the West at large—“extends its arms?” The patterns are similar in every European country, but once-Catholic Ireland offers a particularly instructive example. In recent years, the Irish government has spent over €6 billion (a full 1.5% of GDP) annually on NGO funding, much of it migration-related. Last year, the government lavished €1.2 billion upon International Protection Accommodation Scheme (IPAS) centers, which often manifests in buying properties at above-market rates from local real estate tycoons and hoteliers. In his new book Vandalising Ireland, Irish journalist and academic Eoin Lenihan documents how entities such as Tetrarch Capital, Bridgestock Care Ltd., and prominent real estate families profit from lucrative IPAS contracts from the government. An incestuous Irish politico-journalistic ecosystem ensures the cash flows are unthreatened. 

For capitalists, NGO functionaries, and self-aggrandizing members of the laptop class, the Lampedusa narrative—helpfully reinforced by the likes of Pope Leo—is a veritable bonanza. 

Raspail’s “Benedict XVI was never heard from again, as if he had vanished into the labyrinthine garrets of the Vatican.” The reader is left with an unconfirmed rumor that he died in a plane crash after rushing to France to welcome the migrant armada. In practice, it doesn’t matter, as that fictional Benedict offers nothing distinct from secular institutions.

Consider another enduring name of 20th-century European literature, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, whose noble family is forever linked to the Mediterranean island. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” asserts the opportunistic Tancredi in Lampedusa’s classic novel The Leopard. If Europe is to resemble something worthy of its name, things certainly will have to change. The status quo—call it the Lampedusa status quo—will ensure the continent sleepwalks into violent upheaval of a kind feared by the previous pope named Leo—Leo XIII. With the recent outbreak of hostilities in Iran certain to trigger fresh migratory pressure, Europe cries out for a pope who is undaunted by the challenge. 

I humbly submit that Our Very Holy Father Pope Leo XIV, to whom I pledge my trust and my respect, is wrong about Lampedusa.