In a few short decades, Italy moved from the “sorpasso” boom to a suicidal loop. Bright Italians move out, and young migrants move in. Both are desperate. Things can spin out of control, crashing the nation and the continent. Can the Church save Europe as it did after the fall of Rome?
Chauvinism in America is a cyclical, age-old problem, practically innate to the country. The nation was built on waves of migration, in which the first arrivals turned against the second, often with violence at the edge of the law or outright criminality. Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York shows that the myth of Puzo and Coppola’s The Godfather has its roots in the 19th century.
Chauvinism against immigration in Europe — for centuries a territory of emigration, not immigration — has different roots. It springs from a falling birth rate that does not exist in America. Younger new populations are replacing Europeans, who are having no children, in an ever-aging society. Moreover, European chauvinism is grounded in and entangled with a tradition of antisemitism, which the recent war in Gaza has awakened from its slumber. This combines ancient miasmas into a new chemistry.
The risk in Europe is that younger populations could overwhelm older ones, with profound anthropological and generational consequences.
Siege of numbers
The generational replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. All three major European countries are well below it. In Germany, it was approximately 1.35 in 2023, down from 1.57 in 2021 — a historic low. In France, it was approximately 1.64 in 2023, down from 1.84 in 2019 — traditionally the highest in Europe, it is losing ground rapidly. In the United Kingdom, it was approximately 1.49 in 2023, down from 1.65 in 2019. The trend is downward in all three countries, with a notable acceleration after 2021, the year of the COVID explosion.
Germany received the largest migration flows: in 2022, it exceeded 1.5 million people, including approximately 1 million Ukrainians. In previous years, it hovered around 300,000–400,000 per year. The estimated total over the five-year period: 3–3.5 million. In France, net immigration runs at approximately 200,000–300,000 people per year, with an estimated total over five years of 1–1.5 million. In the United Kingdom, flows increased considerably after Brexit, reaching record figures of around 700,000–750,000 people per year in 2022–2023, with an estimated five-year total of 2–2.5 million.
Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe and in the world. In 2020, 2021, and 2022, it stood at approximately 1.24; in 2023, it reached 1.20 — an absolute historic low. Meanwhile, migration flows toward Italy have been lower than those toward Germany and the United Kingdom. Between 2019 and 2023, an estimated 750,000–800,000 people arrived. The foreign population resident in Italy today is estimated at around 5.5 million, equivalent to approximately 9% of the total population.
But unlike other European countries, Italy’s falling birth rate and foreign immigration are compounded by a third phenomenon, essentially unknown in other developed countries: the emigration of bright young Italians. Over the past ten years, 1.5 million more Italians have moved abroad. Of these, approximately 800,000 are young people aged 18 to 34, and 40% are university graduates. This represents a brain drain. Most come from the South, but recently the exodus has spread to the North-East as well.
In this context, immigrants naturally have a much greater impact than in other countries. Falling birth rates are a global phenomenon with complex, perhaps even natural, physiological roots. The world’s population has increased tenfold in little more than a century; within a few decades it should stabilize, thus avoiding a bio-environmental disaster on the planet.
(see https://www.appiainstitute.org/articles/china/new-cold-outlines/)
Clashes
The brain drain then accelerates the loss of the country’s cultural identity and impoverishes its human capital. Thus, the rising racism in Italy could become even more dangerous.
First- or second-generation foreigners are younger and have less to lose — no house, no income — than Italians, who are older and have more to lose: a home, a pension. Yet immigrants work harder, pay taxes, and are often treated as second-class citizens, not fully integrated. If one presses the “national-racial” accelerator, one risks a Spartacus-style slave revolt.
In Taranto, a few days ago, a group of young people killed an African man. A few days later, an Italian of Moroccan origin with psychiatric problems drove his car into pedestrians in Modena. Young Italians are trying to go abroad, and those remaining in Italy are young foreigners or people of foreign origin with little or nothing to lose. Where does exasperating them lead? Also, in Italy, there is no political capacity to crack down by force on a potential immigrant revolt.
The 1968 protests in northern Italy also arose largely from southerners or their children who had immigrated to the North. If today one lets nationalist, chauvinist, and racist rhetoric run unchecked, while doing nothing — either positive or negative — one risks an immigrant revolt that no one knows how to control.
Rome suppressed Spartacus’s rebellion by crucifying them all along the Appia Way. Today, when the cruelty of ancient Rome is rightly impossible, if the situation is not managed wisely, the slaves could take violent control of the country or create chaos.
Then there are the prisons. Foreign detainees number about 18,500 out of 61,000 — about 31–32% of the total, more than three times their share of the population. These are schools of crime, and immigration from Africa is often organized by criminal groups. Ideological and religious matrices can transform criminal organizations into political factions and vice versa.
This already happened in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. Red and black terrorists recruited and trained militants in prisons, and, in turn, mafiosi of every stripe recruited men among terrorists. The groups that today chant in support of Hamas could tomorrow redirect their energies elsewhere. Repression is certainly necessary, but if it is the only instrument, one is fanning the flames.
Benedict needed
Prevention and integration are also needed. The state cannot move quickly and nimbly on this front. But the Church — the Italian Bishops’ Conference — could do a great deal: new Italians and new Europeans need to be formed and entrusted to parishes. The churches are already doing this and must be supported.
The Church could serve a dual function, both in Europe and in the countries of immigrants’ origin. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, from the 6th and 7th centuries onward, Benedictine monasteries were centers of literacy, assistance, integration, and the development of Roman civilization across the rest of the “Barbar” or “barbarized” Europe. Today, that model could prove useful for raising new Europeans and for the social and cultural integration of immigrants.
At the same time, in the neediest regions of Africa and the Middle East, missionary work can play a fundamental role. Teaching people to read and write, caring for the sick, and providing education, food, and opportunities to the poorest populations is probably the slowest but also the most effective way to weaken Islamic fundamentalism and radicalization. Where education, stability, and social dignity grow, the ground for extremism, violence, and fanaticism shrinks.
Repression alone can temporarily contain the problem, but it risks fueling even more hatred. What is needed is the long-term work of education, integration, and community building. On this front, the Church — together with the State and civil society — can play a decisive role.
Without this, Italy risks crumbling. As Italy has been, for centuries, the center of what Europe is, the continent itself might turn to dust. The tech billionaires, so rightly concerned about the fate of the old continent, might perhaps begin to think from here.
(adapted from an article first published on Formiche)
