The machete carriers and rapists, who appeared almost immediately, suggest planned, hybrid warfare.

The clever Ceuta playbook is familiar:

• Invade;
• Bring no (obvious) weapons, so as to by-pass any potential military response – and render the home country effectively impotent;
• Activate fifth column progressives in the invaded countries;
• Depict locals as racists;
• Embed invaders in the invaded homeland;
• Change cultures and nations.

But, some religious figures have noticed something else about the Muslim invasion of the West.

Here is Bishop Athanasius Schneider, reported by Lifesite News: “Now we are witnessing an invasion. They’re not refugees, no.

“This is an invasion and the mass Islamisation of Europe.

“This is a global political agenda – by the powerful of the world – to destroy Europe culturally and its religion. To destroy Christianity, ultimately, in Europe.”

For Schneider, there are two key points.

First, the invasion isn’t just demographic and cultural. It is also religious. Of course it is.

Islam is a religion, and a colonialist one at that. The Jews and the Christians are the infidel, to be conquered and their religions eliminated.

Second, Schneider claims that the religious replacement is being organised by global elites who are profoundly anti-Christian.

Hence this is a planned de-Christianisation of Europe, occurring on our watch.

Associate Editor of the UK’s Catholic Herald, Gavin Ashenden, has written and spoken on the European death wish.

“There is a particular kind of death a civilisation can choose for itself — not conquest, not plague, but a quiet, voluntary letting go,” he said.

“Europe is in the grip of it now. You can see it in the birth rate, in the open border, in the bishop who will not speak, in the historian who will not defend.

“This is not, at root, a crisis of policy. It is a crisis of the soul. And it begins with a simple, uncomfortable fact: there seems to be no capacity left for saving our society, for valuing our society as it is.

“Instead, it’s being overcome by a whole series of different forces and different people.”

So, it isn’t just about Islamification, in Ashenden’s telling. It is also a crisis from within.

From our willingness to elect communist-adjacent governments. From our acquiescence in faux-compassion-driven immigration policies.

FAILURE

From our giving up on having children. From the failure of two generations of Christian parents unwilling or unable to pass on a once robust, muscular faith.

From our agreeing to the feminist revolution, the wanton destruction of the nuclear family, the downgrading of motherhood-in-the-home and handing over our children to be brought up by the State, with tax relief and subsidies.

From the failure of UniParty “conservative” governments to shout stop!

All in all, it’s the result of politicians who have traded their once core values for power and money. In some cases, of course, it is casual anti-racism.

Then there is Rome’s cheer-squadding for the new world order. Simply waving it through.

The Pope calling mosques “holy places of God” would have the late Cardinal George Pell, among many others, rolling in their graves.

One Catholic priest, Fr Jason Charron, sees Islam as the precursor to the Antichrist, no less.

Some distance, then, from the official, kumbaya narrative emanating from beyond the Tiber. Holy places of God or breeding grounds for the Antichrist?

MASS IMMIGRATION

Rome’s accommodation on mass immigration – they are all refugees, after all, and so entitled to our undying compassion – and on other secularist dogmas, on the Chinese Communist Party and on the glories of Islam are a well-planned attack by the past two Popes on tradition within the Church.

They a long, long way from Pope Benedict’s clear-eyed views expressed in Regensburg in 2006.

This idiocy is prosecuted by Arthur Roche, Rome’s anti-traditionalist henchman. The Society of St Pius X brigade is excommunicated while hordes of Islamist killers are waved through.

Ashenden says, in relation to the immigrant wave: “The difficulty with our secular civilisation, which is engaged in this death wish, is that it has retained certain Christian impulses — compassion for suffering, concern for the stranger, suspicion of cruelty — but it is detached them from all the other Christian virtues.

“It’s like a teenager at the wheel of a fast car, blind drunk, absolutely unable to find the controls.

“Compassion has been separated from prudence. Who is this stranger that I am taking in? Are they a murderer and a rapist, or somebody virtuous who’s become incapacitated through no fault of their own?