Geloven en grenzen: Katholicisme en migratie in België en Europa na 1945

'Beliefs and Boundaries: Catholicism and Migration in Belgium and Europe after 1945' investigates the strategies of engagement that Catholic Church actors (primarily members of the clergy, but also noting the importance of the laity) developed towards issues of migration in postwar Belgium and (Western) Europe. The aftermath of the Second World War saw increasingly complex phenomena related to European migration as it became more diverse both in its composition (as immigrants arrived in large numbers from beyond Europe's borders, and from increasingly varied cultural and religious backgrounds), and in the political management of human mobility (as national and later European migration policies shifted between encouragement, indifference, assimilation, tolerance, securitization and restriction). In the same period, the landscape of Western European religion was transformed by a simultaneous decline in active church participation, alongside increased religious pluralism partly influenced by migration, and gradually the employment of Christianity as a component of 'Europeanness' by elements of the political (far-)right. Christian churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, had to reckon with these factors as they sought to reorient themselves towards a changing sociopolitical world, increasing their attention to social issues, including migration. This study explores how traditional structures of reception and action, such as pastoral care methods, were reshaped from a prioritisation of the preservation of Catholic migrant religiosity towards more nuanced approaches that additionally incorporated the cultural and sometimes political identities of migrant communities, while Catholic actors, particularly in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, also sought to pursue a more outward-facing social mandate that entered into political debates surrounding migration, asylum, and religious freedom, often, but not always, serving as defenders of migrants' and refugees' rights and the integrity of minority religions. Rooted in the analysis of archival materials produced chiefly by ecclesiastical actors, alongside socially-oriented texts from the supreme authority in Rome, the research underlines how migration served as a channel for the Catholic Church to reshape its role as a social and political actor in the postwar Belgian and European context. It interrogates cases of pastoral action at the local levels of the Dioceses of Tournai and Ghent to uncover the challenges and potentials of ecclesiastical and lay initiatives for the benefit of migrant communities. It supplements this with a study of the work of the Belgian episcopate in combining its pastoral commitments for migrants with an increased interest in Belgian migration policy from the 1980s, and culminates in a pan-European macro-level case study of Catholic structures' critique and advocacy in the realm of burgeoning European institutional migration and asylum regimes. Blending the postwar history of migration with reflections on the relationship of religion and mobility, the history of Catholic social initiatives and Catholic Social Teaching, and the changing religious landscape of Europe, it highlights the diversity, intensity, and evolutions present in Catholic Church actors' concrete negotiation of the Belgian and European migration contexts during a tumultuous sociopolitical era.