Europe’s Battlefronts

"Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith." ~ Hilaire Belloc. A truth which Europe has forgotten.

From Crisis

By Charles Coulombe, KCSS, STM

Putin, Groypers, Islam, and Christ: What yoke will Europe choose to pull her into the future?

To the most holy emperor Constantine, Equal-to-the-Apostles, to his mother Helena; to the Orthodox emperors Theodosius the Great, Theodosius the Younger, Justinian; to the most pious Grand Duke Vladimir, Equal-to-the-Apostles, to the Grand Duchess Olga, and all other Orthodox emperors and empresses, princes and princesses, eternal memory!

—Byzantine Liturgy, Sunday of Orthodoxy (First of Lent)

As Lent of 2026 goes on, Europe, the Mother Continent, is actually at war—not on one but at least four different fronts. There is, of course, the actual shooting war in Ukraine, which has gone on for four years in its current form and almost eleven in terms of guerilla fighting. This pits Russia against Ukraine, the latter supported by the European Union and the United States. 

While President Zelenskyy and his cronies are hardly the stuff of heroes, neither is Putin, who declared in his Tucker Carlson interview that he did not see the hand of God in Man’s affairs—so revealing his deep kinship ideologically to the Western leadership he affects to despise. Meanwhile, Ukrainians and Russians continue to die. Ukrainian cities are continuing to be attacked—and, every now and then, the odd Russian one. What is all this bloodshed really for in the end? Certainly, as things stand, it looks as though both Russia and the West will gladly fight to the last Ukrainian.

For some in Europe, if Putin wins this war, he will eventually seize all of Europe, and initiate the same sort of tyranny they accuse him of instituting at home. Certainly, his opponents often don’t fare well, although there is still nothing like the whole Gulag system—despite the government putting out red flags again and raising statues of Lenin. But most European governments are beating the drum that he is the ultimate dictator and enemy of freedom and must be stopped.

Now while that is quite possibly true, the difficulty is that most European governments and the European Union’s Brussels bureaucracy are no friends of freedom and decency either—and this is Europe’s second battlefront. For years, these regimes have been encouraging gender confusion and infanticide; in the name of climate change, they are waging war on their farmers; in more recent times, they have encouraged mass immigration from the Muslim and third world countries. Once these waves of newcomers have arrived, a number flit into crimes of various kinds, while the “Islamists” among them establish “no go zones” allegedly governed under sharia law. 

I say allegedly because thieves and murderers are not de-handed and beheaded, as under real sharia law. The internet is filled routinely with tales of their depredations, which primarily go unreported by the media. As with the primarily Pakistani groomer gangs in Britain, which police often fear to prosecute for fear of “inflaming racial hatred,” it is a situation in large part created by the European governments themselves.

To safeguard this situation, they resort to what has been called “two-tier” policing, with light sentences for Muslim or foreign offenders but draconian punishments for natives who even protest the situation online. It would be odd, indeed, if this situation did not breed a reaction; and so it has. The rise of the so-called “Extreme Right” in recent years has been meteoric, fed both by the rising violence just referred to and—ironically—the numerous bending and breaking of the law by the current regimes in their attempts to stop the “Extreme Right’s” progress.

The rise of the so-called “Extreme Right” in recent years has been meteoric, fed—ironically—by the numerous bending and breaking of the law by the current regimes in their attempts to stop the “Extreme Right’s” progress.In addition, they have witnessed all of the “mainstream” parties—conservative, Christian democrat, Gaullist, liberal, socialist, and green—form rainbow coalitions of one kind or another for the sole purpose of keeping them out of power. Since only the left-wing members of these groupings have any real agenda (the other being primarily employment agencies for higher government jobs) their policies become ever more grotesque, exacerbating the situation further. Said governments’ appeals to their populace to support the great crusade against Russia falls on deaf ears as a result, often enough.

Certainly, the so-called Far Right are not supporters of the War in Ukraine, not least because they believe their countries are being ruined and enslaved by the very people calling for blood and treasure to be spent in Ukraine. Such displays as the murder of Quentin Deranque by Antifa continue to erode any lingering belief in the system on the part of the “Far Right’s” leadership—and to expand their numbers. This is a dynamic which is lost on the current ruling classes in Europe.

But who are the “Far Right,” really? Are they the Nazi enthusiasts or pro-Russian demagogues of the elite’s troubled imagination? Yes and no. That there are, in their number, a few real National Socialists and Fascists, as well as a great many youths driven in that direction by teachers and professors who equated normality with those two political viewpoints is absolutely true. The same dynamic has created a number or pro-Russians, or, at least, people who feel Putin can’t be worse than what they already have. But such folk are a minority.  

What you find in far larger numbers are people who love their national traditions very much and, often enough, a greater European whole, which they also love. They tend to vehemently oppose both Zionism and Islamism, which puts them in a strange category. A great many of them are devout Christians—be they Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant; in the first and third cases, very often of a Traditionalist mindset. A small minority, sadly, are neo-pagans; a great many more claim to believe in “Christian values,” without holding “Christian beliefs.”  

In a word, you have here a very mixed bag, to say the least. What they might be like in power is anyone’s guess; what is certain is that the longer they are kept out of power by trickery—such as voiding elections that give the wrong result (as far as the current rulership are concerned), the more radical they shall be when they finally attain it. Given human nature, they would have to be saints not to be tempted to use the same kind of dishonesty toward their foes once they are in the driver’s seat.

Europe’s third battlefront is, of course, Islamism itself. The “Far Right’s” most draconian answer is “Remigration”: send them all home. Now, while that is a simple answer, and not without a certain utility, the mechanics thereof would be a bit difficult. There are an awful lot of them—and a great many will not want to go. But if the effort is made to force them out—or else they stay and the radical elements make war on the native population, one is left with the horrible denouement of Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech: 

…the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”  

Whether or not that vision is fulfilled, it shall be a messy business.

But let us suppose that it is done. Why were the immigrants brought in the first place? Because of the postwar drop in population brought about by the growth of contraceptives and abortion alongside the secularizing of society. This was acquiesced to not only by the Conservative and Christian Democratic Parties in various countries but also by the churches—including, tacitly, several national conferences of Catholic bishops. 

This harvest of death brought about by the murder of millions of infants means that they are not working in jobs necessary to keep the economy growing, paying taxes to support the pension Ponzi schemes, nor consuming goods in a manner also necessary to keep the economy growing. Remove the immigrants and we are back where we started. So, like it or not, if the “Extreme Right” in power are to succeed in the long-term, then fighting the contraceptive mentality has to become one of their chief tenets.

Beyond the population battle, there is the identity battle. “Christian values” by themselves will not cut it. If they want a sustainable vision, the “Far Right” in Europe must regain a sense of the Traditions from which they sprang. Part of this is obvious: a renewed appreciation and love for every part of Europe’s cultural and historical heritage in the arts, architecture, folkways, and on and on—“Deep Europe,” if you will. But they must also rediscover the writers and thinkers of the European past, meditate on them, and see what can be applied today as an alternative to the liberal “democracy” that has morphed into the amateur-hour totalitarians we have now. 

Every country in Europe—from Portugal’s Integralistas to Poland’s Stańczyky, and from Russia’s Vladimir Soloviev to Denmark’s Kaj Munk to Italy’s Attilio Mordini—has schools of thought and individuals from the French Revolution until World War II who tried to apply Christianity concretely to the Europe of the time they lived in. The rise of the left-wing dictator Hitler, the destructive war he wrought, and the American-Soviet dyarchy afterward effectively killed the tradition. It must be rediscovered, rethought, and applied in some fashion if the New Europe is to survive.

But there is, behind that cultural/social/political battlefront, another—and that is religious. All of Europe’s culture and history hinge on her adherence to Christianity, which first created her and then made her great. And ultimately, when we speak of Christianity, we are really speaking of Christ Himself.

Apropos here is Belloc’s famous quote: 

This our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.

Unless the “Far Right” understand and are willing to apply it when in power, their efforts will avail little in the long run.

But the religious battle is not merely a question of the utility of Christianity for European restoration; there is no greater betrayal of Christ than to simply use His great gift of the Church to us for political or even cultural ends. He died and established the Church and sacraments as the means by which each of us can escape the curse of our first parents’ fall and enjoy eternal salvation. Europe’s greatness was a by-product of the fact her peoples and their leaders accepted that Faith and oriented their lives around it.

Of course, as the two years of Covid showed us, much of the Church hierarchy do not have that same belief. If Europe is to have a fighting chance to maintain her identity, her children must regain the Faith of their Fathers. But it is then absolutely essential for the hierarchy of the Church to regain their belief in her and their salvific mission—not merely for the sake of Europe’s future but for every nation and every individual on the face of the Earth.

As for the European “Far Right,” as they look at what form a future Europe might take in trying to reconcile both national identities and the overarching European identity, they might think about restoring an idea as old as Constantine: the Res Publica Christiana, the Holy Empire, Abendland, Christendom.  Until 1806, and in a real sense 1918, that idea haunted Europe. Perhaps, when the Continent is sufficiently re-evangelized to warrant it, the EU can be transformed into a modern Holy Empire. 

As Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., puts it: 

Catholicism, as Orthodoxy, has, historically, regarded the monarchical institution in this light: raised up by Providence to safeguard the natural law in its transmission through history as that norm for human co-existence which, founded as it is on the Creator, and renewed by him as the Redeemer, cannot be made subject to the positive law, or administrative fiat, or the dictates of cultural fashion. Let us dare to exercise a Christian political imagination on an as yet unspecifiable future. The articulation of the foundational natural and Judaeo-Christian norms of a really united Europe, for instance, would most appropriately be made by such a crown, whose legal and customary relations with the national peoples would be modelled on the best aspects of historic practice in the (Western) Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine “Commonwealth.” 

A Holy Empire, whose constituent nations would be both free, Christian, and United in the best sense of the term.

It might well be argued that Europe requires a string of miracles to avoid the horrific fate that appears before it—and to achieve anything like the proposed regeneration. But it took an even wilder set of miracles to found the Mother Continent in the first place.