Bishop Criticises Vatican For Installing Muslim Prayer Mat
Vatican City — The Vatican Apostolic Library has provided a dedicated prayer room equipped with a Muslim prayer carpet for visiting Islamic scholars, according to Father Giacomo Cardinali, Vice-Prefect of the library, who confirmed the arrangement in an October 8, 2025 interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
"Of course, some Muslim scholars have asked us for a room with a carpet for praying and we have given it to them," Cardinali stated in the interview. The priest described the Vatican Library as a "universal library" and emphasized it is open to scholars of all faiths and religions.
The library, founded in the mid-15th century, houses approximately 80,000 manuscripts, 50,000 archival items, nearly two million printed books, and more than 100,000 engravings, prints, coins, and medals. Its collections include ancient Qurans alongside Hebrew, Ethiopian, Arabic, and Chinese works.
The prayer room is described as a modest space containing a simple prayer rug facing toward Mecca. Cardinali characterized the library as "the most secular of the entire Holy See" and noted that its primary interlocutors include "research centers, public universities, the Louvre, the Metropolitan, NASA."
Swiss Bishop Marian Eleganti strongly criticized the decision in an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews on October 28, 2025.
"Islam is naturally expansive," Bishop Eleganti stated. "As soon as a Muslim prays there, somehow in the minds of the faithful, it then becomes a kind of rooting and foothold, an outpost of the coming dominance that Islam naturally always strives for."
"Islam wants absolute dominance; it is inherently intolerant," he continued. "It has caused Christianity to disappear everywhere. Conversely, one would never allow us to set up a chapel in Mecca, the holy site of Islam itself, where we could celebrate Holy Mass."
Bishop Eleganti described Islam as "a religion that we believe is not really inspired by God, but is deliberately conceived in an anti-Christian sense" and stated it is "a total polemic against Jesus' divine sonship and against his absolute significance as mediator between God the Father."
The bishop emphasized that Islam "denies the Trinity" and that "Christians worldwide suffer persecution at the hands of Muslims." "I think it just shows that even in the Vatican, the people who allow and support this have, in my opinion, a completely surreal, naive relationship with Islam and interfaith dialogue," Bishop Eleganti stated.
The decision has sparked intense debate among Catholics, with critics viewing it as a symbol of creeping syncretism while supporters frame it as an act of scholarly hospitality. The same Vatican has implemented severe restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass, to the point of forbidding parishes from announcing Mass times for Traditional Masses that remain licitly offered.
THE CRUSADER'S OPINION
Let's be perfectly clear: the Vatican just rolled out the prayer carpet for a religion that denies Christ's divinity, rejects the Trinity, and has systematically erased Christianity from every region it has dominated for 1,400 years. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics who want to worship using the Mass of the ages are treated like criminals.
Bishop Eleganti is absolutely right. Try setting up a Catholic chapel in Mecca. You won't just be denied, you'll be arrested, imprisoned, and possibly executed. Non-Muslims aren't even allowed to enter the city. But in the heart of Christendom, in the intellectual treasury of the Catholic faith, we're laying out carpets facing Mecca because someone asked nicely.
This isn't hospitality. This is capitulation. It's the same tired pattern: suppress traditional Catholics who believe what the Church has always taught, while bending over backward to accommodate a religion that explicitly denies the cornerstone of our faith. The Vatican describes its library as "the most secular of the Holy See." That's not a boast. It's an admission of spiritual surrender.
Every Muslim who prays in that room is praying to a god who they believe has no son. They're rejecting Jesus Christ as Lord. And the Vatican is facilitating it in a building that exists because of centuries of Christian scholarship, sacrifice, and martyrdom.
Where is the reciprocity? Where are the churches in Saudi Arabia? Where are the Christian prayer rooms in Cairo's libraries or Tehran's universities? They don't exist because Islam doesn't do reciprocity. It does dominance.
Wake up. This is how Christendom dies: not with persecution, but with permission.
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