Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna has warned that Europe is in danger of surrendering its Christian heritage and capitulating to Islam.
In a homily in St Stephen’s Cathedral on 12 September, the Feast of the Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the cardinal pointed out that the feast was introduced in 1683, in gratitude for the liberation of Vienna from the Ottomans. He then asked the congregation of 8,000: “Will there be an Islamic conquest of Europe?
“Many Muslims hope so,” he went on, “and say Europe is finished. And Europe is indeed about to gamble away its Christian heritage.”
“God have mercy on Europe and all its peoples who are in danger of gambling away their Christian heritage,” he prayed.
Last week the cardinal also defended the placing of crosses on mountaintops. Several crosses on peaks in the Bad Tölz region of the Alps near the Austro-Bavarian border have been severely damaged in recent months, and the well-known South Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner said the peaks “should not be mobilised for religious purposes”. “Did we create the mountains?” the cardinal responded in his weekly column in the Vienna free paper, Heute. “Who have we to thank for the mountains? And isn’t it a great joy to thank the Creator from the top of a mountain?
“Our predecessors who put up the crosses knew that. Are we really that much wiser than they were?” he asked.
Loading ...
