Pope Leo, Lampedusa, and The Camp of the Saints
15th March 2026
On his native country’s 250th anniversary, Pope Leo XIV will visit Lampedusa, an Italian sovereign territory off the North African coast that has long been a destination for migrants seeking to enter Europe. In 2013, Pope Francis made it his first papal destination outside Rome. Publication of Pope Leo’s official calendar recalled Vice President JD Vance’s personal invitation to the United States for the anniversary festivities, an invitation the pope seems to have declined. Adding fuel to the fire, unconfirmed Spanish media reports soon thereafter claimed that Pope Leo “warned the [Spanish] bishops that his greatest concern in Spain is the far right that is trying to ‘instrumentalize the Church.’”
To be sure, any conceivable U.S. administration in this political climate would make such an anniversary uncomfortable for a pope—even more so now than when the Vatican released this schedule a couple weeks ago. Pope Leo is probably wise to skip the transatlantic voyage in July. The Lampedusa symbolism, though, is unmistakable as it is deeply misplaced. It also has sparked comparisons to French Catholic writer Jean Raspail’s dystopian 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.
The novel describes a grotesque armada of one million migrants from the Ganges that sails to the French Riviera. It is a searing indictment of the Western cultural institutions that have grown too nihilistic and narcissistic to perpetuate their civilization. Among the characters is a South American pope more concerned with social justice PR stunts than shepherding the Church. (Interestingly, this “red bishop of Bahia” is named Benedict XVI: “It goes without saying that the pope mentioned in this fictional account is in no way to be taken for Our Very Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, to whom I pledge my trust and my respect,” clarified Raspail in 2006.) “He was a pope in tune with the times, and this was much appreciated by the media,” asserts Raspail’s narrator.
You can find Camp of the Saints on Amazon. I encourage you to buy it and read it. (No, you won’t find it in your local public library.) Then ponder the fact that it was published fifty years ago. At the time, everybody was saying “Nah, this is just exaggeration for the sake of effect.” Little did we know….