An Austrian reporter recently asked Cardinal Christoph Schönborn whether it worried him that Islam is now the largest religion among Vienna’s schoolchildren. The retired archbishop of Vienna’s reply was brief: “Whoever has the children, has the future. That’s my simple answer.”
The numbers behind the question are alarming for the capital city of historically Catholic Austria. In Vienna’s public compulsory schools for the 2025-26 schoolyear, Muslim pupils make up about 42 percent — the single largest group — rising to 49.4 percent in middle schools. Catholics have fallen to roughly 16.7 percent in public schools where combined Christian pupils no longer form a majority.
Though these numbers show the opposite demographic in the Catholic and other private schools (Catholics 45.4%, Orthodox Christians 10.5%, Muslims 7.6%, Jewish 5.3%), such institutions serve only around 11% of the city’s students and thus impact the citywide average only modestly.
Thus, even considering the combined statistics for public and private schools, Muslim students remain the single largest group at 38.3% with Catholic and Orthodox together totaling 33.6%, according to a report by Heute (“Today”), a large Austrian publication.
Catholic Thomist philosopher Edward Feser offered a penetrating reply to the interview clip. Quoting Schönborn’s line, Feser challenged fellow Christians, stating that those “who practice contraception have no business complaining about becoming a minority in their own country. Their grave violation of ancient Christian morality is the primary cause of the situation. Immigration is secondary.”
“This is true even though there is no doubt that liberal immigration policy has greatly exacerbated the situation,” the highly esteemed professor at Pasadena City College in California continued. “For if Christians obeyed the moral demands of their religion, and thereby had large families who did the same, there would never be enough voters to support such bad policies.”
Feser’s point aligns with long-standing analysis of why Western Christian fertility collapsed after the 1960s.
In a July 2025 column, retired Archbishop Héctor Aguer of Argentina asked why bishops remain silent as birth rates plummet. Referring to the landmark 1968 encyclical from Pope Paul VI, which reaffirmed Christian doctrine teaching the intrinsic immorality of contraception, he lamented that “even the memory of Humanae Vitae has been lost.”
“The danger of demographic winter threatens more than a few countries,” the archbishop continued. “In Europe, three out of four households are childless. Forty years ago, St. John Paul II prophetically said that ‘the Europe of the 21st century will be Christian, or it will not exist.’ The truth is that it will not be Christian; it will rather be Muslim.”
Marking the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae’s promulgation, Swiss Bishop Vitus Huonder affirmed in 2018 that contraception was part of the “culture of death.” Pope Paul VI’s predictions — destabilized families, sex detached from procreation, women treated as objects — have all come true. “The European people do not any more replace the generations. They have become dying people,” he lamented at the time.
In a February 2026 interview, Schönborn expressed virtually an identical observation regarding the growing Muslim population owning “the future” and added that those turning away from Christianity “shouldn’t be upset that another religion is growing and that there are people who take their religion seriously.” Europe had been “overwhelmingly Christian,” he acknowledged, while also insisting that coexistence remains possible and that panic is unhelpful.