So the Holy Father alights on the Canary Islands, a volcanic archipelago whose current fame derives less from its endemic lizards than from its status as the Mediterranean’s latest human meat-grinder. The cameras will capture Pope Leo blessing a rescue vessel, undoubtedly one of those NGO ships that effectively operate as a subsidised ferry service for sub-Saharan economic migrants. And because this is 2025, the British taxpayer will be footing part of the bill for the coastal patrols that shadow these operations. We are to applaud this as humanitarianism. I call it a dance of decadence.
Let us abandon sentiment for a moment and consult the historical ledger. The late Roman Empire, in its death throes, was obsessed with the ‘problem of the barbarians’. Did it secure its frontiers? Did it enforce its laws? No. It bought them off, settled them within its borders, and pretended that paying tribute was the same as exercising power. The result was not integration but collapse. The Empire’s Christian leaders, by then thoroughly enmeshed in statecraft, often blessed these arrangements as acts of charity. They were, in fact, acts of abdication.
Now observe our own performance. The United Kingdom, post-Brexit, post-lies, has discovered that withdrawal from the EU did not withdraw us from the moral demands of a continent in demographic crisis. Our patrols in the Mediterranean do not stop boats. They catalogue them. They rescue their passengers and deliver them to European soil where, after a series of legal minuets, they will be granted leave to remain. The Pope’s visit sanctifies this process. The Vatican has long favoured open borders as a theological principle, conveniently ignoring that a Church without a flock is a Church that must import its congregation. But that is a spiritual matter. The temporal reality is that Western Europe is engaged in a slow-motion self-replacement, and the Papal blessing is the ritual that numbs our pain.
Consider the irony. Britain, which once built an empire on the principle of naval supremacy and border control, now finances patrols whose explicit function is to ensure that no border is enforced. We are the patricians of the late Republic, hiring Greek tutors to teach our children while the Goths sharpen their axes at the gate. The Pope’s itinerary includes a visit to a migrant reception centre. He will speak of dignity and hope. No one will mention the tens of thousands who have drowned because the hope they were sold by traffickers is counterfeit. No one will mention that the only way to stop the drowning is to stop the boats, which requires a level of hard-nosed statecraft that our elites find distasteful.
I do not question the sincerity of the Pope’s compassion. I question the wisdom of a policy that mistakes a rescue boat for a solution. The Victorians, for all their hypocrisies, understood moral hazard. They knew that saving a man from a shipwreck was admirable. But they also knew that if you made a career of sailing into storms to fish out the foolish, you would soon be overrun by the reckless. We have made rescue an industry. The Mediterranean is now a watery stage for our collective guilt: a guilt that feels righteous but achieves nothing except the perpetuation of the crisis.
What would a robust response look like? It would involve the Royal Navy enforcing a blockade on Libyan and Tunisian coastal launch points. It would require returning rescued persons to the nearest safe port in North Africa, not transporting them to European soil. It would mean treating the migrant flow as what it is: a mass migration driven by poverty and conflict, not a refugee crisis that obliges us to empty entire continents. But such a policy would require a moral vocabulary that our leaders have forgotten. They speak of rights and of safety. They do not speak of duty to one’s own nation, or of the cultural continuity that makes a nation worth defending.
The Pope’s visit is a symptom of a deeper malaise. We have replaced faith with sentiment. We have replaced patriotism with universalism. We have replaced the hard choices of sovereignty with the warm glow of good intentions. The Canary Islands will continue to receive their human cargo. The patrols will continue to count the dead. And the Holy Father will continue to bless the boats. It is a ritual as empty as any pagan sacrifice. But unlike the Romans, we cannot blame the Christians for our decline. We are the Christians now, and we are marching to the sea.
