A high-ranking representative of Austria's Catholic Church for the first time openly voiced reservations against the construction of minarets."Mosques with minarets would be a provocation," Elmar Fischer, bishop of Austria's westernmost diocese in Vorarlberg, said on Tuesday in a press release.
While Austria's population had been accepting of prayer rooms and mosques in the past, mosques with minarets would run counter to the feelings of "the majority of Vorarlberg's population."
While Austria's freedom of religion acts allowed the building of mosques, it remained a necessity of human respect that a religious or ethnic group that moved into a country first realized a "measure of integration," the bishop said.
In Vorarlberg, the Muslim share of the population is 9 per cent, the Austrian average is 4 per cent, in the capital Vienna 7.8 per cent.
In February, the provincial government in the province of Carinthia passed amendments to its construction legislation, in fact banning the building of mosques.
Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Austria's highest Catholic representative on Sunday stressed his opposition to a mosque ban.
"We have in Vienna a mosque with minarets. Where is the problem? I don't see it," he told public broadcaster ORF.
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