Cardinal Müller: Islam on the March Against a Weakened Christianity

Cardinal Gerhard Müller of Germany has consistently been the figure in the Church who has most thoroughly grasped the meaning and menace of Islam. His latest remarks, delivered at Assisi, are even more anxiety-provoking than those he has made in the past, as he sets out the signs of Christian surrender to those whom the late Oriana Fallaci called “the sons of Allah.” More of his warning to the West can be found here: “Cardinal Müller warns: ‘Muslims do not respect weak Christianity,’” by Patrick Delaney, LifeSite News, September 10, 2026:

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.

Look at how etiolated the Christian faith has become. Look at the decline in church attendance, all those empty pews in churches across Europe. Look at the decline in the numbers of those who call themselves Christian and the rise in the numbers of those who call themselves atheists and agnostics. And look at those who have converted to the worst enemy of Christianity — Islam.

“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.”…

St. Francis did not meet with Sultan Malek al-Kamil to exchange pleasantries, as a precursor of the interfaith racketeers among too many Christian clergy today, who attempt to deny the menacing essence of Islam; nor did he engage in a bit of bomfoggery. He went to carry with him, uncompromisingly, the message of Christ to the people who had not heard it. He preached the Gospel. It isn’t reported what Malek al-Kamil said, but both remained firm in their respective faiths.

The former prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith affirmed these dangers, stating the answer is not this creed [Islam] 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.”

Christians should become more certain and secure in their faith, he says, and dare to tell Muslims that without Christ, “there is no salvation.”

Cardinal Müller sees the three threats to the Christian civilization of the West as intertwined. First, there is the decline in Christian belief. Second, there is the fact that 44 million Muslims now live in Europe, with more arriving every day, and these people are openly hostile to both Christianity and to Christians; third, there is the faith of Islam, which 1.8 billion people around the world hold, with all too many of them supremely confident in their faith, and violent in their behavior toward all non-Muslims.

Without Christianity, argues Cardinal Muller, Europe would not be Europe. Instead, its people would fill their spiritual vacuum with Islam, so irrational in its doctrines, so violent in the manner in which it has spread, so misogynistic toward women, its believers unwilling to integrate into societies created by Infidels whom Muslims consider to be “the most vile of created beings.”

Is his a vox clamantis in deserto, or will the Catholic faithful heed Cardinal Müller, before it is too late?