How Islam Conquered Catholic Spain — Again

Two Catholic priests were facing prison for their comments criticizing Islam. No, this did not happen in Nigeria or in the Middle East, but in Spain. Priests Custodio Ballester and Jesús Calvo and journalist Armando Robles were accused of committing hate crimes during a 2017 talk show appearance, according to Catholic News Agency. The Association of Muslims Against Islamophobia filed a complaint with the Special Service for Hate Crimes and Discrimination of the Barcelona prosecutor’s office, taking issue with the priests’ and the journalist’s criticisms of Islam. The priests each faced a three-year prison sentence and Robles faced a four-year sentence plus hefty fines and a ten-year ban on teaching.

All three were acquitted last week, but only on narrow technical grounds. The Málaga court determined that none of the three men had actually intended to incite hatred against Muslims with their comments, which were “not accompanied by a clear and manifest promotion of hatred toward” Muslims. However, the court derided the statements of the priests and the journalist as “despicable,” “perverse,” and even “delirious.”

During the Middle Ages, Spanish Catholics fought a war to drive Muslim invaders out of their country. In the late 700s, the Umayyad Caliphate had conquered the Iberian peninsula. For centuries afterwards, Spanish Catholics waged war against the Muslim insurgents in a series of battles collectively known as the Reconquista, finally culminating in the expulsion of the invaders in 1492. Less than a century later, in 1571, the military commander Don John of Austria would lead a Spanish armada at the head of the Holy League against an Ottoman (Muslim) fleet and achieved a seemingly impossible victory in the Battle of Lepanto.

During the 20th century, the Caudillo of Spain, military leader Francisco Franco, heavily limited Muslim migration to the nation, emphasizing instead Catholicism as the state’s bedrock and rightly recognizing Islam as a hostile force. No mosques were allowed to be constructed and although some Muslims were permitted to come work in Spain, Franco required and enforced repatriation. Following Franco’s death in 1975, secular forces began importing Muslims en mass.

The secular reforms wrought by Spain’s 1978 constitution saw Catholic vigilance wane and plummet. While Mass attendance was high (anywhere from 70 percent to 80 percent) during Franco’s reign, it had fallen to roughly 40 percent by 1980 and plummeted to 20 percent by 2000. Illegal immigration, mostly from Morocco, surged, going from nearly 10,000 Moroccans crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in 1985 to over 50,000 annually just five years later. Amnesties approved in the 1980s and 1990s permitted hundreds of thousands of Muslims to remain in Spain. Under Franco, the Muslim population had hovered between 2,000 and 3,000. By 1996, Muslims numbered over 500,000.

The 2000s saw an even greater influx of Muslims into Spain, due at least in part to European Union open borders regulations and a major economic boom. Muslim workers would come to Spain from Morocco, Pakistan, and Senegal, with their large families in tow. By 2008, the Muslim population in Spain had soared to 1.2 million. As of 2023, the Muslim population in Spain stands at nearly 2.5 million.

The invasion has been permitted by two closely-intertwined factors: the rise of progressivism and the waning influence of the Catholic Church. Progressivism aggressively promoted multiculturalism, departing from Franco’s doctrine of Catholic supremacy and instead nominally placing all religions on a par with one another. In actuality, of course, this religious tolerance eventually fostered discrimination against Catholicism at the hands of other religious groups, as evinced by the trial of Ballester and Calvo and a host of Islamist attacks against priests, parishioners, and churches across the country.

The rise of progressivism itself, however, has been at least in part permitted by the diluting of the Church’s influence. Across the Western world, the Church has all but ceded its age-old role as the supreme moral authority on earth, allowing itself to be swayed by the fads of each new generation. Instead of boldly confronting the evil innovations of the progressive regime, the Church has focused its attention on a false notion of relevance, chasing after trends and increasingly watering down its moral clarity in an effort to fill pews. Ironically but predictably, this approach has yielded little fruit, if any, and has actually driven many Catholics out of the Church and left those remaining faithful feeling unfulfilled.

Now, the Church finds itself facing a hostile and aggressive enemy, an insurgent long kept at bay which has now conquered the lands once populated by centuries’ worth of faithful Catholics. There are no longer Catholic princes and knights to lead a Reconquista, the temporal leaders of the day are just as much an enemy, more often than not. The leaders of the Church must determine whether or not they will carry on the tradition of their sainted predecessors and confront this foe with courage or continue pontificating on progressive-aligned positions on everything from climate change and immigration to inclusivity and the very multiculturalism in which the enemy invader has taken root. Civilization hangs in the balance.

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