Immigration must be “rational,” says the fiery Italian archbishop Luigi Negri, because uncontrolled immigration leads to the “crushing and extermination of our society.”

“You can’t just open the doors, as if it were a party,” Negri states in an interview with Italian media Tuesday. It is essential to “highlight the economic, human and cultural costs of immigration,” since failing to do so means caving into “ideology.”

“I am a Catholic and therefore I believe in welcoming diversity,” said Negri, the recently retired archbishop of Ferrara-Comacchio and a close friend of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, “but this cannot be unmeasured because otherwise it leads to a crushing and extermination of our society.”

“This is not the way that Christian Europe down through the centuries integrated elements of novelty that contributed to bringing about its richness,” he said.

Asked why the globalist movement is pushing so hard for increased immigration, Negri said that they are ideologically driven to seek a homogeneous culture where everyone thinks the same.

The movement seeks to normalize mass immigration, the Archbishop said, “because this serves the great globalized economy, one of whose objectives is to create a low-paid immigrant workforce.”

The archbishop said that in this regard, Pope Francis is being exploited by secularist society, who use his words to justify their own positions, which have nothing to do with Christianity.

“Pope Francis is being instrumentalized by the reigning worldview,” Negri said. “Today there is a connivance between a certain Christianity and the secularist society, which the Church seems no longer able to say ‘no’ to, which in my view is exactly what is needed.”

“The Church has embarked on a slippery slope that is leading it to give in to the rampant force of ‘anti-Christianity,’” he said. “It is yielding to the dominant mentality and is content to take refuge in a sort of reservation, already imposed in these centuries on many other religious and cultural minorities.”

Far worse than the personal moral failings of a few people is an ideological error that leads to doctrinal “inconsistency” in the Church, Negri said.

“We are tending to come to terms with secularism, to carve out a niche and make Catholicism a sort of element of folklore that does not trouble this atheistic society,” he said.

This loss of identity and a clear sense of mission has not been similarly experienced by Islam, the archbishop noted, because Islam “has a political rather than a religious vocation.”

“More than a faith, Islam is a law, a status, summarized by the word ‘sharia,’” he said.

“Unlike Christianity, which extols man’s freedom and his irreducibility, to the point of making him God’s partner in faith,” he said, “Islam does not take the person into consideration. The Muslim only has value for the social and political context in which he lives.”

“It is no coincidence that Islam spreads among the weak,” he continued, “who need authority to feel protected.”

The archbishop also expressed his concern over “Islam’s tendency to break down the values ​​of Western civilization, especially that of the essential distinction between politics and religion,” which is one the key aspects of the Western rule of law, he said.

“In Islam, religious authorities, which in many cases also act as civil authorities, administer justice in their courts by issuing fatwas that even provide for the death penalty,” he noted.

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