In a passionate speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II issued a call for the First Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim occupation. “Deus vult!” the cry went up from the assembled crowd. “God wills it!” And Christendom responded.
That was a different era. Today the West is no longer Christendom but a secular civilization in decline and undergoing an accelerating capitulation to Islamic imperialism. Instead of a Pope Urban II rallying the Church Militant in defense of the faith, we are saddled with a pacifist Pope Leo XIV calling for “interfaith dialogue” and “communion” between Christianity and the Islamic ideology that is, both historically and currently, an existential enemy of Western civilization.
The Church Militant, by the way, refers in Catholic theology to those serving as soldiers (from the Latin milites) of God engaged in spiritual warfare against sin and evil in the world – not only internally against our own broken nature but externally against Satan and his evil agents.
Fresh from declaring that Jesus Christ rejects the prayers of those who wage war, in denial not only of thousands of years of righteous Jewish and Christian warriors appealing to God for victory but also of more than 1600 years of Catholic “just war” theory, Pope Leo is currently on a tour of territories whose Christian populations have been either radically reduced or nearly eradicated by Islamic supremacism. His message is one, frankly, of willful ignorance: that Christians and Muslims can live together in peace, and that anyone who says otherwise is ginning up conflict and hatred for reasons of bigotry and/or politics.
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The fact that he keeps using Lebanon as a positive example of Muslims and Christians living together, when the Christian population there has been persecuted and reduced to just 30% of the country, is an issue. He seems to always grade Islam on a curve. pic.twitter.com/pyGdb6BG6I — Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) April 16, 2026“I know that in Europe,” Leo begins in the video clip above,
there are many times fears that are present but oftentimes generated by people who are against immigration and trying to keep out people who, maybe from another country or religion another race. In that sense, I would say that we all need work together.
Leo glossed right over the real reason why “many times fears are present” in Europe: the presence of millions of Muslim migrants, a flood of whom is still ongoing, is forcing a fundamental and unsustainable transformation of those Christian countries into increasingly Islamized colonies in which sharia law, no-go zones, terrorism, streets blocked by masses of praying Muslims, soaring knife crime and a literal rape culture, and open hostility toward Jewish and Christian infidels are now part of the new normal for all indigenous Europeans, who oftentimes are treated by their own globalist elites – like Pope Leo – as the real threat to civil society.
“One of the values of this trip,” Leo added about his tour, “is precisely to raise the world’s attention to the possibility that dialogue and friendship between Muslims and Christians is possible.”
Possible? Well yes, but almost anything is within the realm of possibility. Unicorns are possible. Dialogue and friendship are certainly possible, but by definition they are two-way streets. Christians are perfectly willing to live in peace and friendship; this is not in question. The issue is, are Muslims willing to reciprocate?
I understand that as Pope, the Chicago-born Leo is in the business of promoting peace on earth for men of good will. But Christians and Muslims have different understandings of what the word “peace” entails. For Christians, the word is defined as the absence of conflict; for devout Muslims, peace means a world in which all have submitted to Allah and live under sharia. Hence, their view is that the world is divided into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb – the world of Islam and the world of war. This is not a worldview conducive to tolerance and inclusion. And yet it is always Christians, never Muslims, who are expected to concede, to defer, to change, and to be “welcoming,” even at the cost of our traditions, our values, even our churches themselves, and too often even our lives.
Pope Leo and his ilk seem unable or unwilling to grasp that “interfaith dialogue” between Christians and Muslims is always, in reality, a monologue in which we are expected to listen and accommodate the latter accordingly. Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, argued that interfaith dialogue with the West should be undertaken only to draw infidels over to Islam, bringing concessions with them.
The willful blindness of Pope Leo and multicultural fantasists aside, there are no historic or contemporary examples in which Islam and Christianity live perpetually side-by-side as equals in peaceful harmony. Individual Christians and thoroughly Westernized Muslims, yes, but not the two cultures as a whole. The demonstrable reality is that wherever Islam gets a foothold in Christian countries, it leverages that foothold and exploits Western freedoms, rights, and pluralism in order to expand its political and social power. It wields deception, coercion, demographic jihad, and ultimately violence in order to subvert the host culture and begin seizing control, once its population has become a significant enough minority (this could be as low as a single-digit percentage of the population; Muslims make up an estimated 4-7% of the Belgian population, 6.6% of Germany, perhaps 7% of England, and 10% of France). Eventually Christians and Jews flee, are expelled, or are reduced to scant dhimmi minorities in their own countries.
As my Freedom Center colleague Daniel Greenfield put it recently after the Pope visited Algeria and paid his respects at a monument celebrating genocidal jihad,
In 1955, Algeria had over 1 million Catholics and 140,000 Jews. Today, as Pope Leo visits Algeria, there are some 8,000 Catholics in Algeria and there are fewer than 200 Jews.
99% of the population of what was one of the old territories of Christianity are Sunni Muslims.
Subsequently, when Leo visited Lebanon, he praised the country as a model of Christian-Muslim coexistence: “I think one of the great lessons that Lebanon can teach to the world is precisely showing a land where Islam, Christianity are both present and are respected, and that there is an opportunity to live together, to be friends.”
In fact, Lebanon was a Christian-majority country from the first century AD onward until as recently as the 1980s. In a few short decades Christians there went from a 60+ percent majority to a minority of perhaps 30 percent. To gain an understanding of how that came about, read the autobiography of Act for America activist Brigitte Gabriel about her childhood experience as a Lebanese Christian.
As one poster on X wrote,
Celebrating Lebanon as a model of coexistence, without naming the very real persecution, demographic collapse, and Hezbollah-driven hostility that has decimated the Christian population, risks producing a romanticized narrative that does not serve the truth — or the Christians still living there.
As went the Middle East, now goes Europe, where Islam has asserted itself with the complicity of the continent’s globalist leaders as the “strong horse” over a Christianity in decline. Other Western societies such as Australia are soon to follow – even the United States is not immune – unless dramatic, perhaps even illiberal, steps are taken to turn the tide and reclaim the West’s predominately Christian identity. This will require a Church Militant willing to stand in defense of our faith and push back against Islamic persecution and hostility. At the very least, the entire West needs to undertake a new, lawful Reconquista through remigration. If such steps are not taken, the demise of Christianity and the dominance of Islam will be accelerated and assured.
Christians, Muslims, and the Truth About ‘Interfaith Dialogue’
The idolator Pope Muddler II