[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

New Yorkers recently encountered what Londoners and residents of other cities in the British Isles have been enduring.

On Sept. 25, a large group of Muslims combined religious fervor with political protest by praying in front of Trump Tower. Not only have the British, Scottish and Irish seen such gatherings but experienced far worse: migrants, usually Muslims, raping and sexually abusing women and girls. More than 100,000 demonstrators on Sept. 13 protested the British government’s inaction and apparent goal to make such migrants a protected class immune from law.

In response to those crimes, Catholic bishops in Britain and Ireland react the way American bishops do toward crimes committed by migrants who enter the United States illegally.

“Have you heard one English bishop express sympathy for the English people’s concerns about criminal aliens invading our country? I haven’t,” the Rev. Nick Donnelly, a British Catholic deacon, wrote. “Have you heard one English bishop express outrage over the hundreds of thousands of English girls raped by men from foreign cultures? I haven’t.”

Why? Because the Vatican helped build the Trojan Horse which Muslim migration to Europe represents.

As FrontPage Magazine reported in March, the Vatican strikes an indulgent pose toward Islam that reeks of appeasement, to the point of ignoring persecution. As part of its posture, the Vatican actively encourages Muslim migrants to come to Europe while maintaining silence about anti-social behavior and its broader consequences.

The Vatican’s indulgence not only demonstrates its more conciliatory approach toward Islam. It also reflects attempts to forge an alliance that would foster international peace and justice. Pope John Paul II initiated plans for such an alliance to present an ideological alternative following European Communism’s demise.

“The Church is aware that it can offer a sort of new civil religion to the United States of Europe,” wrote Enzo Pace, sociology professor at the University of Padua. “Islam thus becomes the most important moral interlocutor because the Church sees it as a well-structured religion which is on the increase in contemporary Europe.

“To ensure this integration, the Catholic Church believes it is necessary to accept the idea of recognizing Islam as a universal religion, while, at the same time, inviting Islam to accept at least the basic moral and juridical principles of European Christian culture.

Bishops implemented that directive by selling underutilized churches and schools to Muslim groups, with churches becoming mosques. In 2006, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy build a mosque in Genoa.

The union, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, advocates “an extremist version of the Quran, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalised, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule,” reported Milan’s Corriere della Sera. The group’s president, Mohamed Nour Dachan, refused to sign a document pledging Muslims to accept Italy’s constitution, denounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Nevertheless, a Vatican cardinal suggested Muslim students receive Islamic religious instruction in Italian schools during the hour reserved for Catholic instruction.

“If there are 100 Muslim children in a school, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught their religion,” Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said in 2006. “If we said ‘no’ until we saw equivalent treatment for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries, I would say that we were placing ourselves on their level.”

In 2008, the bishops of England and Wales asked Catholic schools to reserve prayer rooms for Muslim students and to adapt lavatories for ritual washing before prayer. “The demands go way beyond legal requirements on catering for religious minorities,” reported the Daily Mail. 

But the worst example of appeasement happened in Belgium.

Bishops turned their churches into homes for Muslim migrants to force the government to grant amnesty. In 2006, more than 30 Belgian churches served such a purpose. About 300 migrants occupied Antwerp’s Magdalena Chapel. Other churches held as many as 700.

At Brussels’ Our Lady of Succor Church, migrants lived in small tents donated by Catholic relief agencies, conducted Muslim services, erected computer tables near the pulpit and even set fires on the floor. The Rev. Herwig Arts described the scene at Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel for Gazet van Antwerpen in 1998.

“(Migrants) removed the tabernacle, (and) installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass,” Arts said. “It has upset me very much. For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore.”

Belgium’s bishops were not amused.

“Everybody is entitled to a good place in our society,” said Monsignor Luc van Looy, the bishop of Ghent, including what he called “illegal fugitives.”

Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the archbishop of Brussels and Belgium’s leading prelate, added that “solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own nation.”

Bishops thus silenced Arts and other priests who held similar opinions.

Pope Francis accelerated the momentum. More than four months after his election in 2013, Francis made his first pastoral visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where thousands of migrants fleeing Libya’s civil war were detained. Afterward, he decried the “globalization of indifference” toward migrants.

Two years later, Francis asked parishes in Europe to take in at least one family escaping civil disorder in Syria. In 2016, the pope not only visited the Greek island of Lesbos, home to thousands of Syrian refugees. He brought 12 Muslim refugees from three families with him on the return trip to Rome.

During his visit to Lesbos, Francis lectured about the moral imperative to help migrants “who have faces, names and individual stories,” he said. As European governments imposed immigration restrictions, the pope criticized their “fanaticism of indifference” while visiting Marseilles in 2023.

But the victims of migrant crime — especially women and girls who were raped and sexually abused — also have “faces, names and individual stories.” The Vatican not only expresses its own “fanaticism of indifference” toward them but also toward fellow Catholics who have had churches vandalized by Muslims.

In 2018, French authorities recorded 1,063 attacks on churches. In Germany, reported one outlet, “crosses are broken, altars are smashed, Bibles are set on fire, baptismal fonts are overturned and the church doors are smeared with Islamic expressions such as ‘Allahu akbar.’ ”

“A completely different culture is approaching us,” said Hans-Georg Maaßen, former head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. “We are not at all prepared for this, as we’re incapable of resolving conflicts even by means of violence, like family clans do from the Arab states. These people resolve conflicts by violence, whereas people in Central Europe think that this can only be done through the courts.”

For Maaßen, the consequences would be devastating.

“The Europeans will succumb to Islam,” he said. “On the one hand, because they are unable to even see this conflict coming, and on the other, because they are incapable of resolving conflicts in a similar fashion. The end result will be the gradual destruction of our European cultures.”

In this clash of civilizations, Rome caters to Mecca as Vichy catered to Berlin 85 years ago.