Bishop Negri, based in the province of Ferrara, has openly voiced his worries about immigration, focusing on the increasing number of Muslims reaching Italy and the European continent.

Negri complained:”In the recent decades the Church, in spite of the extraordinary eminences of Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI, is declining to a surrender to the rampant force of anti-Christianity: the Church is giving in to the dominant mentality and settles itself to seek refuge in some sort of reserves, the same reserves imposed in our history to many other religious and cultural minorities”

Negri goes on saying that what the current Pope, Francis, is doing is basically making compromises with secularism which are hurting the Church badly and showing its incoherent side.

“We are making compromises with secularism, in order to gain a small place in our society and become some sort of folklore element, which would not annoy this atheist society”.

Negri then goes back to discussing politics, focusing on Islam and immigration. Negri reiterated: “Islam is more like a political ideology than a religion: Islam, more than a religion, is actually a system of laws which can be summarized in what we know as Sharia” [continues] “and (Islam) differently from Christianity, which exalts the freedom of man and its irreducibility to the point of making the man partner of God in Faith, does not take into account the person.” [continues] “another disturbing aspect is the tendency to overthrow the values of Western civilization, first of all, that of the impassable distinction between politics and religion, repeatedly emphasized by Pope Ratzinger and which seems to me one of the best aspects of our Constitution”

Wise words coming from Negri, but will Pope Francis listen? He will likely ignore the criticism from Negri the same way he ignored all the previous criticism he received from many other holy men, increasing once again the number of enemies inside the Church.