Put Biffi’s beef with mass migration on the menu

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 05, 2026

My friends at CatholicVote (CV) have launched a new platform called Zeale to keep pace with the ways by which people now consume their media. As an old guy, I’m probably not their target audience. But being an old guy has its advantages. Case in point:

CatholicVote published an explosive address by the late Cardinal Giacomo Biffi Feb. 4 in which the then-archbishop of Bologna made a case for giving preference to Catholic migrants and argued Muslim immigrants would not assimilate as well. The cardinal also predicted that the future of Europe would be either Catholic or Muslim.

The address, translated by CatholicVote and originally delivered by Cardinal Biffi in 2000 before members of the Italian Bishops’ Conference’s Migrantes Foundation, argues that secular officials should regulate migration with an eye to maintaining and defending “the distinctive identity of the nation.”

Officials should pursue that mission, Cardinal Biffi also argued, despite the criticism of those who evoke “the specters of racism” and “xenophobia,” even if Catholic clergy are among such critics.

Read the whole speech here.

I love—love—that CV unearthed this 2000 speech by Italy’s Cardinal Giacomo Biffi and translated it into English. I don’t know what the backstory is to CV putting this speech out there now, other than the obvious politics (and the ecclesiastical politics) of the moment. But, being an old guy, I remember when Cardinal Biffi gave this speech.

People in 2000 freaked out on Cardinal Biffi for saying Italy should prioritize Christian immigrants over non-Christian immigrants. Here in Connecticut, the newspapers covered Biffi’s speech with one of those small, one or two paragraph, news items from the Associated Press or some other wire service. That was all we saw at the time. But it was enough to generate an angry letter to the editor by some elderly self-identifying Catholic who called out Biffi for his supposed un-Christian charity and prejudice against Muslims.

Even in 2000, long before I feared for the death of the West, I was on board with Biffi. That a culture has a right to its own self-preservation seemed to me to be common sense. The attacks on Biffi struck me as anti-Catholic. And that was then. Reading it now, my goodness, the man was a prophet.

Two things jump out at me, reading this speech in 2026. The first is his use of the word “reciprocity” in dealing with the Muslims. The only Pope in my lifetime to make this an issue was Pope Benedict. Neither the Popes after Benedict nor even before him—no, not even St. John Paul II—made “reciprocity” the byword for what the Christian West has the right to expect from its Muslim arrivals and from their countries of origin. And Biffi gave this speech five years before Benedict became Pope. I now think he must have been one of the originators of Pope Benedict’s reciprocity policy.

The other thing is the sheer weightiness, the seriousness, with which Cardinal Biffi speaks. The careful distinctions. The—I don’t know how else to say this—the adultness of the man. Rare is the high Churchman today who speaks this clearly, this gently-but-firmly—not seeking to offend but speaking truth regardless—as Biffi did in 2000. There used to be many more. Today, you can count them on one or two hands. Remember when Fr. Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, responded to critics of his article against pro-family ecumenism in the U.S. by complaining on Twitter about “the haters,” as if he were a teenage girl in middle school? The public policy pronouncements coming from much of our Church leadership today are not quite that bad. But they are nowhere near the level of Cardinal Biffi’s sophistication as demonstrated by this speech.

I want to end in the same place I ended my December 13th column:

That does not mean that the Catholic hierarchy should stop advocating for universal moral principles or for the dignity of every human being. Or that the faithful should turn a deaf ear to its own shepherds. But it does mean the bishops’ advocacy should take greater account of where their own flock stands in these matters. A more balanced approach, one that gives greater deference to the Catechism’s teaching about the obligations that immigrants owe to the countries that receive them, would go a long way toward helping the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd—and of those who speak on his behalf.

Cardinal Biffi, in his speech to the Italian Bishops’ Conference’s Migrantes Foundation in 2000, gave a master class in how to do that.