The Dalai Lama in Malmo

It was largely ignored in the U.S. but shocked many in Europe when they heard last month that the Dalai Lama had declared that “Europe belongs to the Europeans.” Especially shocked were young people ignorant of Christian beliefs and practice or who think they know what they are and have rejected them yet, reflexively, fall into reverence mode when it comes to the Dalai Lama on account of his ceaseless espousal of peace, tolerance and compassion, ”values” also endlessly invoked by the E.U.’s official multiculturalism and which the globalist entity claims to embody. His declaration was the more shocking because of where and when he made it.

We’ll come to that in a moment. First, it must be said that the shock was itself surprising. After all, ever since he fled his country when the Communist Chinese invaded and occupied it in 1959 he has been saying to the world, “Tibet belongs to the Tibetans.” Europe’s countries are not the lands of the Muslim Middle Easterners and Africans who have invaded them anymore than Tibet is that of the alien Chinese. Of course if the natives of those lands fail to reproduce themselves while the aliens do, a danger exists of their eventually being replaced. The danger increases if the “values” of diversity and multiculturalism dictate that the natives do not resist the invasion of the aliens but welcome them instead.

It should also be noted that American young people, at least those who live without roots in suburban tract developments where the majority of Americans do, closely resemble the youth of Europe. They have been inculcated with the same “values,” disdain Christianity, listen to the same kind of music and spend hours every day on social media. If they live in the South they may have helped tear down a Confederate statue.

To be sure, there are exceptions. The wonderful news, from the traditionalist Catholic point of view, is that their number evidently is growing. That brings us to the where and when of the Dalai Lama’s declaration: Sweden, three days after the century-long virtual one-party rule of Social Democracy was ended by a new populist nationalist party, the Sweden Democrat Party, securing 18% of votes in parliamentary elections. More exactly, he spoke in Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city and one whose population is now nearly 50% foreign-born, most of the foreigners being Middle-East and African Muslim “refugees.”

The number of “refugees” in Malmo is so high because in 2015 when the flood of them into Europe was at its height, Sweden, in ratio to its population, took in more than any other E.U. nation. Sweden was a magnet because of the housing, health, education and jobless benefits Social Democratic government made available. At the same time, the “values” of diversity and multiculturalism required that the benefits be extended to the “refugees.” The trouble is that the cradle-to-grave welfare system was designed to meet the needs of Swedes in Sweden. Planners hadn’t taken into account having to house, feed, school and provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of “refugees” also. Neither were Swedish police prepared to deal with the number of crimes, from littering to robbery, rape and homicide, committed by the “refugees.” The result is a welfare system that is going broke and a quality of life in too many urban neighborhoods akin to that in central Africa. Normally placid Swedes, especially younger ones, are reacting against this. Hence the sudden rise of the Sweden Democrats.

That is to put things in terms that sound negative. It is better to understand that in voting Sweden Democrat a large number of the country’s young people were affirming their identity as Swedes.

Though more than merely impressive, the rise of the Sweden Democrats is nothing compared to that of the nationalist populist AfD in Germany. It didn’t even exist four years ago, became the main opposition party in the German parliament in federal elections last year, and now, according to a survey last month, is Germany’s second largest party. Its appeal? It rejects Chancellor Angela Merkel’s E.U.-globalist policies that led her to opening the country’s borders to more than a million Middle East and African “refugees” in 2015 with results like those in Sweden and everyplace else in Europe where the “refugees” have settled.

Those results are why some E.U. member countries — Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic — have kept them out, as Italy has now begun to do. The reason was succinctly stated last month by the prime minister of the Czech Republic Andrej Babis on Czech National Radio: “Illegal immigration is a threat to European civilization.”

The extent to which voters all across Europe see things the same way will be put to the test next May with elections for seats in the European Parliament. Even if nationalist populist candidates don’t do as well as seems likely, it is still possible to see off on the horizon the glimmering of something which could finally take the shape, at some point, of a new Christendom.

Of course the collaboration of the Church would be necessary. Right now it is headed by a pope who does not share the view expressed by the Dalai Lama in Malmo, to say the least. At the moment when these lines are written in real time he is visiting the three Baltic Republics. During the two days he was in Lithuania, the one out of the three that is majority Catholic, he stressed, as he does continuously, that it is the “duty” of Christians to “welcome the stranger.”

I wonder if he really believes that by continuing to harp on this “duty” to “welcome the stranger” he can cast into oblivion all memory of the history, customs and traditions of European lands, all rooted everywhere on the continent in Christian beliefs and practice, as easily as he thinks he can change Church teaching by rewriting a catechism?