Welcome Without Christ Is Not Charity

Bishop Antonio Suetta of Ventimiglia-San Remo has done something so obviously Catholic that it now appears almost revolutionary. In his Pentecost 2026 pastoral letter, Non c’è amore più grande di questo, he announced that from the 2026/2027 pastoral year his diocese will undertake a specific programme directed towards the Muslims living in its territory, joining charitable presence to Christian witness and the proclamation of the Gospel.¹

That should not be controversial. It is the ordinary duty of the Church. Yet it breaks a taboo because a large part of contemporary Catholic pastoral practice has quietly accepted a division unknown to the Gospel: charity for the body, silence about the soul. The migrant may be fed, clothed, advised, accompanied, legally assisted, socially integrated and culturally welcomed; but when the question becomes whether he should be invited to know Jesus Christ, the language often changes. Suddenly charity becomes caution. Mission becomes embarrassment. The Gospel becomes a private possession to be hidden in the name of respect.

Suetta’s point is devastating because it is so simple. If Christ is the Saviour, then deliberately withholding Him is not respect. It is deprivation. The immigrant is not fully welcomed if he is offered everything except the one thing the Church exists to give: Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, “the way, the truth, and the life.”

The origin of the initiative is itself revealing. In an interview, Suetta explained that the idea came from below. At a meeting of Caritas volunteers in Ventimiglia, one volunteer asked why Christians give help, support and welcome to migrants, yet do not think to offer them what Suetta called “ciò che di più prezioso abbiamo,” namely the faith and the Gospel.² That question exposes the pastoral contradiction. If the Gospel is truly the greatest treasure, why is it so often the only treasure Catholics are afraid to share?

The bishop’s letter is not a manifesto of hostility towards Muslims. It begins from charity, presence, encounter, prayer, respect and testimony. It invokes Nostra Aetate, which teaches esteem for Muslims while preserving the continuing duty of the Church to proclaim Christ. The Council states that the Church “regards with esteem also the Moslems”; but the same declaration also says that the Church “proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ.”³

This is the distinction that much postconciliar practice has blurred. Respect is not relativism. Dialogue is not muteness. Esteem for what is true or noble in another religion does not require Catholics to behave as though the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, the Church and the sacraments were optional extras. On the contrary, if these things are true, they are the very substance of charity.

Suetta writes with unusual directness that to love one’s neighbour, especially the stranger, includes wanting him to share in the joy of the Gospel. He also insists that Christ must be spoken of “non con imposizioni, ma con amore” — not with impositions, but with love.⁴ That is the Catholic balance in one sentence. No coercion. No contempt. No manipulation. But also no cowardice, no embarrassed silence, and no practical denial of the universality of Christ.

The inevitable objection comes from the Francis years: did not Pope Francis repeatedly condemn proselytism? He did. But the serious question is what the word means. In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis wrote that evangelisation is first concerned with preaching the Gospel to those who do not know Christ; that such people have a right to receive the Gospel; and that Christians have a duty to proclaim it without exclusion. He then added that the Church grows not by proselytising, but “by attraction.”⁵ Those statements are not contradictory unless evangelisation has first been emptied of proclamation.

Francis’s criticism of proselytism cannot honestly be used as a gagging order against the Gospel. It condemns a false method of mission: pressure, manipulation, recruitment, coercive religious salesmanship, or institutional number-building. It does not condemn the free, loving and explicit proclamation of Jesus Christ. Attraction is not silence. A hidden Christ attracts no one.

The Church herself has already clarified the term. The 2007 CDF Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization explains that “proselytism” once meant missionary activity, but in recent usage has come to mean promoting religion by motives and means contrary to the Gospel, in ways that fail to safeguard freedom and human dignity.⁶ That must indeed be rejected. But the same Note rejects the opposite error: the idea that it is enough to help people become more human or more faithful to their own religion, without aiming at conversion to Christ and to the Catholic faith. Such confusion, it says, leaves the missionary command of the Lord “unheard and ineffective.”⁷

This is precisely the problem Suetta confronts. Much modern Catholic humanitarianism is willing to serve the migrant as a body, a legal case, a sociological category or a political symbol, but not as a soul for whom Christ died. The Church is then reduced to a religiously flavoured non-governmental organisation. Its works may still be generous, but its supernatural horizon has collapsed.

Suetta sees another danger as well. Muslims arriving in Western countries, he writes, can wrongly identify public immorality with Christianity itself; only coherent Christian witness allows them to see that secularisation is not Christianity, but its corruption.⁸ This is an essential point. The first obstacle to the conversion of Muslims is not Islam. It is the unbelief, embarrassment and practical apostasy of Christians. A de-Christianised Europe cannot evangelise convincingly because it no longer knows whether it believes its own Gospel.

That is why the bishop’s image of the rope is so forceful. If someone is being carried away by a river, and we have a rope, he writes, it would be “una negligenza grave” not to throw it. The rope is not an imposition on freedom; the rope is liberation. He then imagines Muslims at the Judgment asking Christians why they did not make the truth known to them.⁹

That is not triumphalism. It is Christian realism. To refuse to throw the rope in the name of sensitivity is not humility, but negligence.

Nor is Suetta advancing a private theory. Ad Gentes teaches that all must be converted to Christ, made known by the Church’s preaching, and incorporated into Him by baptism and into the Church, while still acknowledging that God can lead the inculpably ignorant to faith by ways known to Himself. It immediately adds that a necessity lies upon the Church, and “a sacred duty,” to preach the Gospel.¹⁰ Redemptoris Missio states that no believer and no institution of the Church can avoid the supreme duty of proclaiming Christ to all peoples, and that initial proclamation has a “central and irreplaceable role.”¹¹ Dominus Iesus adds that interreligious dialogue “does not replace, but rather accompanies” the missio ad gentes, and that equality in dialogue concerns personal dignity, not doctrinal content or the place of Jesus Christ.¹²

The doctrinal line is clear. Dialogue is ordered to truth. Religious liberty forbids coercion, not proclamation. Charity requires respect for freedom, not silence about salvation. The Church must never manipulate the vulnerable, exploit material need, or confuse evangelisation with cultural contempt. But neither may she hide Christ from those whom Providence has placed at her door.

Suetta’s initiative matters beyond Liguria because it restores the proper order of Catholic charity. First, the stranger must be loved as a neighbour, never despised as a problem. Secondly, he must encounter Christians who actually live as Christians, not functionaries of a spiritualised welfare agency. Thirdly, when friendship, trust and grace open the way, he must be offered Jesus Christ plainly, freely and lovingly.

A Church that gives bread but withholds the Bread of Life has misunderstood her mission. A Church that offers welcome but not Christ has confused hospitality with salvation. A Church that speaks of human dignity while refusing to speak of man’s supernatural end has reduced charity to management.

Bishop Suetta has not said something extreme. He has said something Catholic. Welcoming the immigrant is incomplete, and finally a betrayal, if one offers him everything except the essential: the proclamation of Jesus Christ. To give food, shelter, legal assistance and human friendship is good. To give Christ is greater. The rope is in the Church’s hands. Not to throw it is not neutrality. It is negligence.

Antonio Suetta, Non c’è amore più grande di questo: dare la vita, pastoral letter to the Diocese of Ventimiglia-San Remo, Sanremo, 24 May 2026. The diocesan website identifies the letter as concerning charity and the proclamation of God’s love to Muslims in the diocese; the full text, reproduced by Messa in Latino, gives the 2026/2027 pastoral initiative and its connection with the diocesan Catechetical Office and Caritas.
Stefano Chiappalone, “Suetta: la vera carità verso i musulmani è annunciare Cristo,” La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, 27 May 2026.
Second Vatican Council, Declaration Nostra Aetate, 2–3.
Suetta, Non c’è amore più grande di questo.
Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 14.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization, n. 49.
CDF, Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization, 3.
Suetta, Non c’è amore più grande di questo.
Suetta, Non c’è amore più grande di questo.
Second Vatican Council, Decree Ad Gentes, 7.
John Paul II, Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, 3, 44.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Dominus Iesus, 2, 22.

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