Cardinal Gerhard Müller warned that Islam is advancing while the Christian West collapses from within and that “Muslims do not respect a weak Christianity that is ashamed of the Cross and reduces itself to a charity organization or an environmental watchdog.”
The line comes from a 2026 address prepared for the “Tavole di Assisi,” organized by Italian senator Simone Pillon, and was published by Michael Haynes in The Catholic Herald, which said that it had received a copy of the talk.
According to the Herald, Cardinal Müller described “an unprecedented identity crisis” in formally Christian nations, stating they are being attacked from outside and eaten away from inside. “The Christian West is no longer merely threatened by external forces, but is being eroded by an internal apostasy,” the German cardinal warned.
“We are witnessing the triumph of post-humanism: a nihilistic ideology that, in its attempt to emancipate humanity from God, ends up destroying humanity itself, reducing it to manipulable matter, to an algorithm among algorithms, and depriving it of its dignity as the image and likeness of the Creator,” he said.
St. Francis and Islam
Within the growing vacuum of this loss of Christian faith is introduced a “vigorous expansion of Islam” as a potential supplanting and heretical belief system.
Unlike the “secularised West,” he said, Islam is “not ashamed of God, is not ashamed of transcendence, but proposes an anthropology and a revelation radically different from those of Christianity.”
He centered the speech on St. Francis of Assisi’s meeting with Sultan Malek al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade. A “sentimental and relativist trend,” he said, has recast St. Francis as “a precursor of modern syncretism, a prophet of pacifist dialogue as an end in itself, where all religions are equivalent and none possesses the truth.”
That image, Cardinal Müller told the Assisi gathering, is “a historical and theological falsification.” St. Francis did not go “to launch a diplomatic salon or to confirm the Sultan in his faith.” He went from “love for souls and by the unshakable certainty that Jesus Christ is the only Savior of mankind.”
Dialogue that hides Christian identity is not respect, he said: “Interreligious dialogue, if it is to be authentic and respectful of human dignity, cannot be based on disguising one’s own identity.”
Muslims, he added, “respect those who believe. St. Francis showed respect for the Sultan precisely because he spoke to him with the parrhesia of the Holy Spirit, offering his own life as a witness.”
The West must recover its faith, ‘proclaim Christ’s social kingship,’ outside Whom ‘there is no salvation’
Cardinal Müller identified a deeper cause to his diagnosis, arguing that “the West has lost its faith because it has lost its reason.” In the resulting “spiritual void,” and amid attempts to “redefine human nature, marriage, life, and death,” Islam can look “as a solid rock.”
The former prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith affirmed these dangers, stating the answer is not this creed that “separates faith from reason, or that conceives of divine omnipotence as pure arbitrariness.” But rather the West must “rediscover the courage of mission” and “proclaim Christ’s social kingship” by affirming that “outside of Jesus Christ there is no salvation.”
European Union built on the foundation of Christianity
The Assisi remarks fit a series of earlier interventions in which Cardinal Müller treated unbelief, migration, and ascendant Islam as one crisis.
In June of this year, speaking at the Rome conference, he said that Christianity “supplied the moral underpinnings of treasured ideals such as human dignity, conscience, freedom and equality,” emphasizing that “on this foundation stands today the EU.”
Cut from the Gospel, Europe would “suicidally give itself over to its downfall”
In a May essay, the cardinal defined the West as “the cultural community of the Germanic and Slavic tribes and nations, which emerged from the legacy of the Western Roman Empire and are united in their faith in Christ, the Son of God and universal Savior of humanity.”
“Thus,” he wrote, “Europe is Christianity,” and apart from this definition it “loses its formative soul and becomes a lifeless body that, like an ownerless territory, falls into the hands of the nearest and strongest neighbor.”
‘Globalists’ weaponizing mass migration to destroy national identity
Finally, he warned in an exclusive December 2023 interview with LifeSiteNews that globalists are weaponizing mass migration in order to destroy the national identity of Christian nations, rather than aid the poor.
“Mass immigration is not about helping people but about destroying national identity,” Cardinal Müller said at the time. “They say that national identity is nationalism, which has caused all the wars, so they say they are against nationalism, but they are really against the nation.”
“If nationalism is the reason for wars, we must ask who is financing the wars and what interests are behind it.”
“They want everyone to be completely isolated and not connected by language, culture, family ties, or a native land where you feel at home,” he continued.
“They want to destroy all that. They want everyone to be atomized, without cultural and religious roots and identity,” he concluded.