The Netherlands: Cardinal Simonis talks about the “Islamic peril”.
Cardinal Adrian Simonis, Primate of the Netherlands, regrets that “spiritual vacuity” which is invading the kingdom. “Today, we discover that we are disarmed before the Islamic peril”, he says in an interview given to the Italian daily Avvenire. The cardinal wonders, “what is the origin of this Muslim radicalism of certain young people who were born and raised” in the Netherlands. For the prelate, “could it not also be the spectacle of extreme moral decline, of spiritual decadence that we offer them?” “Today, politicians ask Muslims to accept our values”, he says. “What are these? Gay marriage, euthanasia? I, myself, am against these ‘values’: will we need to accept these as authoritative?”
Cardinal Simonis brings up the “lack of identity” of the Dutch faced with Muslims, and misses the time when Christians in this country “knew how to fight and die for their faith”. “But I have hope”, the prelate emphasizes, “that these tragic facts will make us recover our identity”. Evoking the “famous tolerance” of the Netherlands, the cardinal recalls that “during three centuries, Catholics had been excluded from public functions”. “Tolerance came later, by a common loss of faith about 40 years ago, with Protestants and Catholics”, confided the Dutch cardinal, who fears a tolerance founded on the void. For the prelate, it remains to “find again our Christian roots, that is our Christian identity”. “It is my hope, and I already see signs of it in the young who are once again re-discovering the Faith.”, he concluded.
Msgr. Simonis spoke this way notably after the murder of Théo van Gogh, Dutch filmmaker assassinated on November 2, in the name of radical Islam. The Netherlands are today considered as the social “avant-garde” of Europe because of the laws adopted on euthanasia, drugs, prostitution, gay marriage and adoption by homosexual couples?
