Pope Francis spent the weekend in Marseille where he admonished Europe for their attitude towards migrants. Specifically, the Pontiff took to task those who used words such as ‘invasion’ and ‘emergency’ when discussing the millions of migrants who have arrived in Europe in the last decade. ‘Those who risk their lives at sea do not invade, they look for welcome,’ he pronounced. Those who said otherwise were ‘fuelling alarmist propaganda’ and acting contrary to the teaching of the Catholic church.

The Pope reiterated the Vatican’s four-stage approach to migrants: welcome, protection, promotion and integration, the overriding aim of which is ‘the safeguarding of human dignity’. He continued: ‘Those who take refuge in our midst should not be viewed as a heavy burden to be borne. If we consider them instead as brothers and sisters, they will appear to us above all as gifts.’

The real propaganda comes from those like the Pope, who would have us believe that there is no migrant crisis

Close to where the Pope gave his address in the southern French city is Marseille’s main train station. It is almost six years to the day since two young French women, cousins aged 20 and 21, both studying medicine, were stabbed to death outside the station. The perpetrator was a Tunisian, in France illegally, who took the women’s lives in the name of the Islamic State.

As I wrote in June, not long after a Syrian had stabbed several babies in an Annecy playground, such incidents are no longer ‘isolated cases’, whatever Europe’s leaders may tell their people. They are increasingly common.

Take Nice, 100-odd miles up the Cote d’Azur from Marseille. In October 2020 a Tunisian migrant stabbed to death three worshippers in a church, having made the journey across the Mediterranean specifically for the purpose. A fortnight ago in the same city a 53-year-old woman was beaten half to death by a man the authorities described as ‘Swedish’. That was a half-truth; he had Swedish citizenship, but he was an Angolan who had already committed acts of ‘ultra violence’ in his new country before fleeing to France.

This month, the Ministry of Interior in France released figures that revealed the disturbing rise in crimes committed on the country’s public transport network in 2022. In particular, sexual assaults are up by 13 per cent; such crimes have soared 68 per cent in the last six years. According to the ministry, 55 per cent of the crimes on the network are committed by ‘foreigners’, of whom 29 per cent are classified as minors.

This is no great surprise; as Emmanuel Macron conceded last year, half of crime in Paris is the work of foreigners.

In charge of the Interior Ministry is Gerald Darmanin, who greeted the pope on his arrival in Marseille on Friday. One suspects he didn’t tell His Holiness what he had told reporters earlier in the week: that France will not welcome any of the 11,000 migrants from Africa who have recently come ashore on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa.

Nor, perhaps, did he repeat the warning that he issued during a radio interview on Thursday. Citing a credible threat against France from Al-Qaeda, Darmanin said there was always the possibility that Islamic terrorists could exploit the migrant route to gain entry into Europe, as they did in the summer of 2015 prior to the coordinated assault on Paris in November that left 130 people dead.

A handful of political figures in France have challenged the Pope’s attitude towards mass migration. Eric Zemmour, leader of the right-wing Reconquest party, and his deputy, Marion Marechal, have both used the airwaves to criticise what they regard as his naivety. ‘What does the Pope want?’ wondered Zemmour. ‘That Christian Europe, the cradle of Christianity, should become an Islamic land?’

Marechal, a practising Catholic, expressed her view that ‘the Pope should not get involved in politics’. It particularly riled her that the Argentine Francis is not European and therefore ‘does not know the type of immigration we are experiencing’. Zemmour made a similar point in 2020, when he was still a journalist, accusing Pope Francis of being ‘an enemy of Europe’ who ‘despises Europe’.

Marechal is nearer to the truth than Zemmour. The Pope doesn’t despise his adopted home, but like the Archbishop of Canterbury, who shares his unsophisticated idealism on the subject of mass migration, he is sheltered in his palace from its worst effects, and of course its cost.

As figures from Britain’s Home Office detailed last month, the migrant crisis ‘is costing the taxpayer around £8 million a day’. In France, the bill for the taxpayer is €54 billion (£47 billion) each year. The 1,000 inhabitants of the Vatican are exempt from paying income tax.

There are, of course, migrants who arrive in Europe and become valuable hard-working members of society. But there are also many who arrive with no such intentions.

This is the towering challenge confronting the continent. How to distinguish between those fleeing war and persecution, and those who simply see Europe as a way of making money, legally or illegally. Or worse, those who see it as a target, as the Islamic State did in 2015 when its members attacked Paris, a city of ‘abominations and perversion’.

This article is not ‘alarmist propaganda’, it contains cold hard official facts. The real propaganda comes from people like the Pope, who would have us believe that there is no migrant crisis. There is, and its scale endangers Europe.