Americans are still piecing together their lives after the attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota. Each week we read of a bloody new jihad incident. Muslim immigrants and their children have been behind most of them, from the 2016 bombing in Brussels to the 2015 slaughter in Paris and the 2014 butchery of journalists at the magazine Charlie Hebdo. It was Muslim immigrants who conducted the wave of public gang-rapes that shocked Germany on New Year’s Eve 2015–16, and dozens of European born Muslims have been apprehended en route to volunteering for the murder squads of ISIS.

Counterintelligence expert Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer has estimated that up to 15 percent of Muslim ‘refugees’ from Syria have links to ISIS. The Pew Report found that one in five U.S. Muslims believe that suicide bombings ‘in defense of Islam’ can sometimes be justified. Globally, that figure rises to one in four.

Hundreds of thousands of radical Muslims dwell in self-enclosed enclaves across Western Europe. One of four residents of Brussels under age twenty is of ‘Islamic origin.’ The colonization of Europe has proceeded very quickly, aided and abetted by generous social welfare programs that offer immigrants a comfortable life in Germany or England for the price of showing up. But Pope Francis has repeatedly condemned any attempt to stop the influx of Muslim migrants, in statements that were one-sided and moralistic, far different from the official Church teaching as codified in the Catechism.

Francis’s most sweeping statement on the subject was probably his 2013 speech at Lampedusa, a town in impoverished Sicily that is inundated annually with hundreds of thousands of economic migrants from Africa, outnumbering its citizens. In that speech, he compared economic migrants to Abel and skeptical Westerners to Cain. The pope also compared Europeans (worried, financially strapped, and sometimes physically brutalized by the migrants) to King Herod, who slaughtered the infants of Bethlehem in an effort to murder Jesus.

And German Chancellor Angela Merkel listened. She could have followed international law, under which refugees must be accepted by the ‘first safe country’ that they reach, which in the case of those fleeing the Syrian civil war, was NATO member Turkey. Instead under Merkel’s leadership Germany followed the advice of the pope, and the dictates of post-Christian, post-Western multiculturalism. With high-minded abandon she accepted more than a million Syrian migrants, forcing much of Europe to follow suit. The results have been an unmitigated catastrophe, as hundreds of thousands of military-age Muslim males have flocked to Western European countries.

Whatever Pope Francis’s inner feelings or personal opinion, the Church has a settled teaching on immigration, which cannot be altered by off-the-cuff speeches. That teaching is codified in the Catechism:

The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.

Notice that the ‘more prosperous nations’ are obliged to accept migrants only ‘to the extent they are able.’ The government can put conditions on the right to immigrate. And the immigrants, too, have obligations to the country that accepts them — including the obligation to obey its laws. Yet imams all across Europe claim that Muslims are only bound by sharia, which they will someday impose on the rest of the population.

When large numbers of Sunni Muslims attempted to colonize much of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christians energetically organized to prevent them from doing so — as students of history will remember from the Battle of Lepanto and the sieges of Vienna. As the Center for Security Policy warns, now the Islamic world is employing a different tactic for expansion. Instead of armies waving banners, it sends ‘refugees’ waving asylum claims — marching them straight through Turkey into the heart of once-Christian Europe.

Christians are under no obligation to surrender their hard-fought freedom to millions of immigrants who will vote to impose sharia, whose mosques will harbor terrorists, whose apologists will defend honor-killing and female genital mutilation. In fact, to do so is sinful. The Church is not a suicide cult.

John Zmirak is author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, from which this column was adapted. It originally appeared at Pewsitter.