A Vatican official told the media this week that Islam will sooner or later conquer a majority of Europe.
LifeSiteNews reported:
Europe will grow more “Islamicized” if Christian Europeans do not start having more children, and going back to Church, a senior Vatican official said this month. Msgr. Piero Gheddo, a famous missionary and an official with the Vatican’s Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, told Zenit news service that Europe’s indigenous inhabitants have abandoned Christianity and are becoming “paganized.”
“The fact is that, as a people, we are becoming ever more pagan and the religious vacuum is inevitably filled by other proposals and religious forces,” said Msgr. Gheddo, who founded AsiaNews, the Christian missionary news service. As religious practice diminishes in Christian Europe, “indifference spreads; Christianity and the Church are attacked.”
“If we consider ourselves a Christian country, we should return to the practice of Christian life, which would also solve the problem of empty cradles.”
Msgr. Gheddo pointed to demographic statistics showing that the population of native Italians is decreasing by 120,000 or 130,000 a year “because of abortion and broken families.” At the same time, 200,000 legal immigrants a year are moving into Italy. More than half of these, he said, are Muslims who continue to have the large families that Italians now eschew.
“Newspapers and television programs never speak of this,” he said. “However, an answer must be given above all in the religious and cultural fields and in the area of identity.”
Msgr. Gheddo was responding to the taunts of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who angered many on a recent official visit to Italy when he said that Europe should convert to Islam. He gave a lecture to 500 young women, who had been paid to attend, in which he urged them to convert and offered to find them Muslim husbands in Libya. The comments were denounced by Archbishop Robert Sarah, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, who called them a “provocation.”
But Msgr. Gheddo warned that the provocation could well have been a mere prediction.
“No newspaper – except Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Episcopal Conference – has seriously taken into consideration how to respond to this challenge of Islam, which sooner or later will conquer the majority in Europe,” he said.
Recent surveys conducted in Italy by local Catholic dioceses have found that the much-quoted number of Italians claiming to attend Mass weekly, 30 percent, can be deceptive. In Venice, it was discovered that the number of those actually attending is closer to 18 percent, and the numbers drop dramatically among younger Italians.
Libyan tyrant Gaddafi called Europe to Islam during his recent trip and demanded that they pay the jizya.
