by Christopher A. Ferrara
December 28, 2016
It seems Cardinal Christoph ("Holy Communion for public adulterers") Schönborn is having second thoughts about Austria's suicidal open borders policy, which has allowed an invasion by "refugees" — overwhelmingly military age Muslim males — whose most prominent contributions to Austrian society thus far are rape, sexual assault, street violence, demands for accommodation of Islamic law in Austrian public life and a massive drain on the public treasury.
In a TV interview broadcast on Austrian television, Schönborn said that "he had come to 'rethink' his stance on the migrant crisis." Now he is "no longer convinced that Europe should accept all arrivals" and is becoming "more cautious" because an "unbelievable number" of "refugees" had arrived in the country.
The always politically correct Schönborn, during an apparent bout of uninhibited rational thought, went so far as to give voice to the warning that so-called Islamophobes have been voicing all along: "Will there be a third Islamic attempt to conquer Europe? Many Muslims think this and wish this and say that Europe is at its end."
Now you tell us! As if we didn't know. Dipping his toe even deeper into the deadly lava pit of politically incorrect opinions, Schönborn even declared: "Europe's Christian legacy is in danger, because we Europeans have squandered it."
Backing away from the fiery cauldron, however, Schönborn quickly added: "That has absolutely nothing to do with Islam nor with the refugees." Of course not! What could an ongoing Muslim invasion of Western Europe possibly have to do with danger to Europe's Christian legacy? Nothing, nothing, nothing!
According to Schönborn, "It is clear that many Islamists would like to take advantage of our weakness, but they are not responsible for it. We are." So, on the one hand Islam has nothing to do with the danger to Europe's Christian legacy; but, on the other hand, Islamists seek to take advantage of the weakness of Christians. Not that Muslims taking advantage of weak Christians would pose any danger to Europe's Christian identity. Never! The danger is entirely the fault of Christians because they are allowing all those Muslim "refugees" to take advantage of them — which has nothing to do with the refugees.
So much for the Cardinal's bout of rational thought. It appears to have ended almost as soon as it began — a lucid interval in the mind of a double-talking Modernist who thinks that admitting public adulterers to Holy Communion is consistent with the Church's constant teaching against admitting public adulterers to Holy Communion.
Our weathervane prelate does have a point, however. The spiritual weakness of the once Christian West now invites into its midst precisely what Christian Europe repelled at the gates of Vienna in 1683. And if Schönborn wishes to appreciate that weakness in its existential depth, he need only look in the mirror, where he will see this:
That's the Cardinal presiding at one of the balloon Masses that symptomize the collapse of faith and discipline in the Catholic Church since the calamitous Second Vatican Council with its ruinous "opening to the world" and its absurdly irenic view of what Pius XI, only a few years before the Council, called "the darkness of Islam." No doubt the spectacle of this buffoonish prelate would elicit contemptuous laughter from the Imams and Muslim "refugees" who dream of an Islamic caliphate rising in the midst of what was once Christendom.
And all of this is just as Hilaire Belloc predicted back in 1938, on the eve of World War II, after World War I had already sounded the death knell for Christian civilization with the fall of the House of Hapsburg — precisely in Austria. As Belloc wrote then:
"Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it. We see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines. The very structure of our society is dissolving…
"In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa. The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed: but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed."
The time of delay is over. The awful moment is now. But with prelates like Schönborn leading the Church, under a wayward Pope who even the Wall Street Journal can see is effectively "the leader of the Global Left," humanly speaking there is no hope of averting "the second period of Islamic power."
But then we have the Mother of God to rescue us when all seems lost. Such is the prophetic promise of the Message of Fatima, whose glorious fulfillment will tower above the failings of vacillating prelates and deluded Popes.