So the Pope, in his infinite wisdom, has descended upon Spain to canonise its fashionable anti-war sentiment and open-arms immigration policy. One can almost hear Gibbon spinning in his grave. Francis, the self-styled pontiff of the periphery, has chosen to elevate the very policies that are unravelling the European project.
To praise Spain’s ‘welcome’ to migrants while the continent drowns in cultural and economic dislocation is not pastoral; it is performative. To hail Madrid’s cowardly refusal to arm Ukraine as ‘moral clarity’ is to confuse caution with virtue. This is the Fall of Rome, but with better public relations.
The Empire once hired barbarians to defend its borders; now it invites them in and calls it hospitality. The Pope, a moral leader in an age of moral abdication, has simply thrown a wreath upon the wreckage. Spain, a nation that once defined itself by its Catholic identity, now defines itself by its shame.
And the Pope, for all his humility, has blessed this self-immolation. The children of the 16th century are now orphans of the 21st. Esto perpetua?
Not likely.
