On Sunday, July 12, Poland will hold the second round of its presidential election. The contenders are the incumbent President Andrzej Duda and Rafał Trzaskowski. The stakes are enormous: the election will decide whether Poland will remain a nation faithful to traditional values centered on the family or become another country subjected to the dictatorship of the politically correct.

Fear-mongering propaganda uses the spectre of the 1918 Spanish flu to support the hypothesis of a dangerous second wave of COVID-19. This is irrational. It portrays the coronavirus as a force of nature beyond our control. The concept of a "second wave" in epidemiology is an imperfect one. It would be more worthwhile to study how the virus "hides out" in host animals and find ways to eradicate it.

The figures decreased in April, surely due to bad weather and the pandemic. However, in May numbers of illegal immigrants entering the EU from various Mediterranean routes tripled compared to the previous month. From January to May, 5,500 cases have been recorded, virtually triple the number for the same period in 2019. Frontex has reported this, but individual countries are not responding

Greece and Malta are flagrantly rejecting illegal immigrants, by taking them back to the coasts of Turkey and Libya and leaving them there. Unlike Italy, Greece and Malta are fighting against human trafficking, Malta in cooperation with the Libyan coast guard, whose primary sponsor is still Italy.

Why does politics believe that the nation-state is overrun by unstoppable globalization and thereby condemns itself? The XI Report on the Social Doctrine of the Church in the World issued by the Cardinal Van Thuân Observatory is dedicated to this problem. The nation is configured as a "homeland" precisely because it has its roots in the "fathers" and John Paul said that duty to the homeland derives from the fourth commandment: Honour  your father and mother. This is why its necessary to recuperate this concept in the face of the current unstoppable forced globalism.

Defending health cannot be bartered for our loss of freedom. Yet, by the same token, we mustn’t forget that, in recent years, a misunderstood sense of democracy has all but destroyed the family and devastated the moral principle of our right to life. The challenge is rejecting authoritarianism without returning to false sense of democracy and freedom.

A scene from Communist China took place in Marina di Cerveteri north of Rome. A parish priest surprised by two law enforcement officials is ordered to stop a Eucharistic celebration. What’s the reason? Because there were faithful gathered outside in the churchyard praying at the recommended distance. 

It is often said that the system of welcoming migrants that operates in Europe corresponds to the principle of subsidiarity. But this is a deception: the social agencies that welcome illegal immigrants and asylum seekers are actually run by the State in terms of funding as well as regulations; as such they are only agents of the State, and they operate only as long as the State wants them to.

Funding, exchange of favours, consultancies, contacts and many ideological affinities: there is still much to discover about the connection (which exists and is evident) between Podemos, the Spanish left-wing party in government, and the socialist regimes in South America, especially with former President Morales in Bolivia.