Jean Raspail, the distinguished French author, made his early reputation as an explorer and travel writer.  He had a special and sympathetic interest in the disappearing indigenous peoples of South America and Asia.  Raspail went on in later years to earn several of the highest French national awards: the Légion d’Honneur, along with the Grand Prix du Roman and Grand Prix de littérature from the Académie Française. A lifelong traditionalist Catholic, he died in 2020, survived by his wife of nearly 70 years.

His most memorable work is his 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, re-published now in a new English translation with a noteworthy introduction by Nathan Pinkoski.  The title is ironic. The Camp is a dark fairytale; a sardonic, deliberately exaggerated dystopian fable.  One million impoverished refugees from India suddenly board ships.  They land in southern France, eager to share in its material plenty, but bringing along their own pathologies and bitter resentments.  Paralyzed by decades of comfort, easy moralizing about global solidarity, and unlimited compassion without a cost, French leadership collapses.  More Third World millions follow.  Europe is overrun; its culture erased.

The Left in France, and later in this country, trashed Raspail as a “racist” and “white supremacist.” Nathan Pinkoski, in essays here and here, offers a more accurate portrait.  Raspail was well aware, from direct experience, of both the suffering and the sins of the Third World, and the naive imprudence of his own country’s secularized elites.  Raspail’s real theme in The Camp is a leadership class simultaneously overconfident, haunted by First World guilt and self-hatred, and spiritually dead, leading to the wreckage of a civilization.  The refugees bring with them not just their problems and appetites but also their souls, their beliefs.  And as Raspail argues, in a struggle between those who believe in nothing but themselves, and those who believe in miracles – something or Someone higher than themselves – the latter always win.

The author reserves some of the harshest treatment in The Camp for his own Catholic leaders. Back to that in a moment.

Much more than an ocean separates the American experience from France and the rest of Europe.  The United States is barely 250 years old.  European civilization goes back millennia, with many of its current nations emerging from blocs of ethnic and linguistic unity.  The United States is different; a constructed country held together not by ethnicity or even language, but by laws and – until recently – a broadly Biblical moral code.  And unlike modern Europe, we’ve always been a nation of immigrants.

That continues, and Catholic social services have played an outstanding role in welcoming and helping the newly arrived.  I saw that firsthand in 27 years of diocesan staff service.  Trump administration cuts in public support for such Church-related work, combined with its overly broad and aggressive immigration enforcement, have done senseless damage.  The taunting and belligerence of anti-ICE protesters worsens the problem.  So does the refusal of key local authorities to cooperate with federal officers in carrying out the law – law passed by Congress and for which both political parties are responsible.  Complaints about ICE ignoring local police protocols are cynical theater when local police decline requests for help.

But put such turmoil aside for a moment.  How should Catholics approach immigration law and its enforcement? Some immigrants here illegally are chronic, often violent, criminals.  The border collapse under the Biden administration greatly increased their number.  They need to be weeded out.  In all such cases, the current administration’s actions are justified.  Yet many other “illegals” contribute fruitfully to American life.  Some arrived here as a child.  They’ve grown up in this country and have no other homeland.  All have a God-given dignity that demands respect.  Blunt-edged enforcement is self-defeating.  More importantly, it destroys productive lives.

But let’s return to Jean Raspail and his caustic portrayal of Christian leaders in The Camp of the Saints, including Catholic bishops.  All of them are intentionally excessive caricatures.  But they’re not without some grounding in reality.  The reading from Isaiah (58:7-10) at Mass this past Sunday, February 8, may point to the root of the author’s frustration:

Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.

There are two basic commands in that passage: (a) show mercy to the needy, not just with pious words but concrete action; and (b) remember your duty to your own.  In The Camp, Raspail’s target is not genuine Christian charity.  It’s an unbalanced “compassion” that subverts the real virtue of charity with imprudence, moralizing without grasping the consequences, and a neglect for the concerns and safety of the specific people a bishop is tasked to shepherd.  On the immigration issue, it might be useful to examine the statements of some U.S. and European bishops – even some cardinals; perhaps even a whole bishops’ conference or two – in that light.

Jean Raspail likely never met Giacomo Biffi.  Along with many other sensible but unacknowledged Catholic bishops, Biffi – then the cardinal archbishop of Bologna – was thoroughly sane on sensitive pastoral matters.  In September 2000, he addressed a gathering of fellow Italian bishops on his nation’s emerging immigration crisis.  His words were both faithful to Catholic teaching, and eminently realistic.

They were a balance of welcome and help for new arrivals, and a firm defense of national identity, laws, and culture, with an insistence on the need for immigrants’ loyalty to their new home and respect for its people. They included a frank assessment of the difficulty Muslims often pose by resisting integration into historically Christian cultures.

He noted that “The general exaltation of solidarity and the primacy of evangelical charity – which in themselves and in principle are legitimate and even necessary – show themselves to be more generous than useful when they fail to reckon with the complexity of the [immigration] problem and the harshness of reality.”

Exactly so.  Read a full English translation here.  It’s worth it