Boats and Men: A Desecration at Normandy

There are places where the ground itself preaches. The Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer is such a place. Nine thousand crosses and Stars of David stand in ranks above Omaha Beach, marking young men who crossed a sea not to conquer a people but to liberate one — who died, in the end, fighting an ideology that had taught a continent to look upon whole categories of human beings as an infestation to be repelled.

It was on that ground, yesterday, on the eighty-second anniversary of the landings, that the Secretary of Defense chose his words. He told the assembled that “different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies.” He named them: “Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive.” And then the question, posed among the graves: “When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

Note the rhetorical sleight, for it is not accidental. He spoke of ideologies — and then, in the same breath, of boats and men. The conflation is the whole point. A frightened mother in a rubber dinghy off Lampedusa is not an idea; she is a person, made in the image of God, very often fleeing the precise barbarisms our own foreign policy helped set in motion. To name her arrival an “invasion,” to set her among the dangers that “storm” the beaches, is to perform the oldest and most disingenuous move in the politics of cruelty: to turn a human face into a category, and a category into a threat.

And to do it there. To stand on the soil consecrated by men who died precisely because another generation of demagogues spoke of human beings as a contaminating tide — this is not merely poor taste. It is a desecration. The dead of Normandy are made to underwrite the very logic they fell to defeat. One can scarcely imagine a more complete inversion of the meaning of their sacrifice.

Two ways to stand before the sea

There is another way to stand on a shore and look at the boats.

In July of 2013, the first journey of his pontificate carried Pope Francis not to a capital or a cathedral but to Lampedusa, that small Italian island that has become the threshold of Europe and, too often, its graveyard. He threw a wreath into the water for those who had drowned. He spoke of the tragedy as “a thorn in the heart,” and he indicted what he called the globalization of indifference — the comfortable numbness that lets us read of the drowned over breakfast and feel nothing. He had come, he said, “to awaken our consciences.”

Now consider what comes next. On July 4 of this year — the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of American independence — the first American pope will not be in the United States. The Vatican has been explicit: there will be no papal visit to America in this jubilee year. Leo XIV will instead spend that day on Lampedusa. He will lay flowers at the cemetery. He will stop at the Porta d’Europa, the Door of Europe that faces the sea. He will bless a plaque dedicating the Favaloro Pier to Pope Francis. He will greet the migrants themselves, and then he will offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

I do not think the symbolism is lost on anyone, least of all on a Pope who chooses his gestures with care. An American Pope, on America’s birthday, declines the parade and goes to the boats. Of the survivors of that desperate crossing, he has already said that the volunteers who receive them “have shown the smile and the attention of a human face to people who have survived in a desperate journey of hope.” A human face. The very thing the rhetoric of “invasion” exists to erase.

Here, then, are two homilies preached over the same Mediterranean water in the same season. One sees boats and men and says invasion. The other sees boats and men and says Christ.

The genuinely dangerous ideology

Our Lord did not leave the matter to interpretation. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” — and the welcome, or its refusal, is the very hinge on which the Last Judgment turns (Mt 25:35). The Church’s teaching could not be clearer or more consistent: the migrant and the refugee possess an inviolable dignity that no border, no fear, and no electoral advantage may override. This is not a fashionable accretion of the present pontificate. It is the seamless garment of life, woven from the same cloth that protects the unborn, the condemned, and the poor. Lex credendi, lex vivendi: what we profess, we are bound to live.

So let us, for once, take the Secretary at his word and ask which ideology is in fact the dangerous one. Is it the conviction that a drowning stranger is my neighbor? Or is it the creed — increasingly dressed in the borrowed vestments of Christianity — that can stand among the graves of liberators and find, in the arrival of the desperate, only an enemy to be repelled?

The men beneath those crosses answered that question with their lives. We dishonor them when we pretend otherwise.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.