The Pope’s private secretary has given warning of the Islamisation of Europe and stressed the need for the continent’s Christian roots not to be ignored, in comments released yesterday.
“Attempts to Islamise the West cannot be denied,” Monsignor Georg Gaenswein was quoted as saying in an advance copy of the weekly Sueddeutsche Magazin to be published today. “The danger for the identity of Europe that is connected with it should not be ignored out of a wrongly understood respectfulness,” the magazine quoted him as saying.
He also defended a speech that the Pope gave last year that linked Islam and violence, saying it had been an attempt by the pontiff to “act against a certain naivety”. In the speech during a visit to Germany in September, the Pope appeared to endorse a view, contested by most Muslims, that Islam’s followers spread their religion in its early days by violence.