"THEY want to destroy the three foundations of human existence: faith, homeland, and family. THEY try to test the miracle of the Resurrection with their reasoning, laugh at the immortality of the soul, and fill the family union with vice. THEY are building a new tower of Babylon under the name of "Globalization," and hack away at national roots. THEY want to turn man into a cog in the global system of CONSUMERISM, they kill the yearning in him for truth and beauty, and force him to work not in the name of creation, but so that he can BUY more."
"So who are THEY?" I asked impatiently.
"Demons," he answered simply. "Do you believe in the devil, Padre Pablo?" "Do you believe in God, my daughter?" he answered me with a question. "With all my heart!" I answered. "If there is God and the angels, that means that the devil also exists, and his legions of demons are amongst us." "Maybe they wear special orthopedic shoes to hide their hooves, and wigs to hide their horns?” I laughed. “What do they look like, these demons?” “They look just like us, my daughter,” said Padre Pablo sadly. “That is why it is so hard to identify them. They glorify satan, their kind master, who doesn’t forbid anything. The cult of satan is founded on the issue of absolute moral freedom and unaccountability. Europe has already ratified her contract with the devil, denying God’s judgment and creating its own—the Strasbourg court. Don’t you feel the spirit of Satan everywhere? It is strong now, like the smell of garlic.”
Five years have passed, and now I understand that that crazy old man was absolutely right.
Back to the Cage with the Lions
The phantom of Christianophobia is wandering around Europe.
March, 2010. Glasgow, Scotland. A forty-seven year old American street preacher named Shawn Holes was surrounded by a group of homosexuals. “They kissed each other, laughed, and asked me what I think about that.” Howells later related. “I answered that they risk drawing the wrath of God, because in God’s eyes, what they are doing is a sin.” The group of gays quickly called the police. A policeman came up to the American and asked him, “Is it true that you said that gays will go to hell?”
The preacher’s explanation that they provoked him was not accepted. He was speedily arrested and spent the night in jail. The judge sentenced him to a fine of 1000 pounds. A local Christian community passed the hat in order to ransom the unlucky American from prison.
March, 2010. The Supreme Court of Great Britain denied the appeal of Miss Ladeles from the town of Islington, who worked at the local registration bureau of marriages, births, and deaths. Miss Ladeles asked that she not be forced to register gay marriages as it goes against her Christian convictions, and enough atheists work at the bureau. The bureau’s administration threatened to fire her. Miss Ladeles took it to court, where her complaint was deemed insubstantial.
February, 2010. Strasbourg. A group of socialists, communists, liberals, and “greens” sent a letter of protest to the court against the presence of a cross in the prayer room of the European Parliament, saying that it disrupted the “neutral nature” of the room; they also demanded that the Church services conducted there once a month and lasting no more than a half an hour be stopped.
February, 2010. Germany. Twelve crosses were taken down from the walls of a public hospital in the town of Bad Soden and thrown into the garbage at the demand of a Moslem patient who said that the cross “prevents him from recovering.” This sacrilege against a religious symbol took place before the eyes of Christian patients.
Febrary, 2010. London. The House of Lords prepared to review a bill on sex education which would require secular and religious schools to give children information on homosexual relations, contraception, and abortions. If the bill is accepted, priests and nuns will have to explain to schoolchildren that “civil partnership” and homosexuality are “harmless and normal,” and tell them where they can have an abortion and how to use condoms.
February, 2010. The Netherlands. A scandal in the town of Reusel. During the traditional carnival, a group of gays broke into a church where Sunday services were being celebrated and demanded Holy Communion. The priest told them that according to religious rules he cannot give them Communion. Sodomy is a serious sin in Christianity. The gay activists made a complaint to the police, and the priest was quickly summoned to testify.
December, 2009. Germany. Eight Christian families from the town of Salzkotten were sentenced by a local court to serious fines for not allowing their young children to go to sex education lessons at school, citing their religious convictions; they also forbade them to participate in the theatrical production of “My body belongs to me.” Because they refused to pay the fine (paying the fine would mean acknowledging the guilt), eight respected fathers of families went to prison (one of them was there for a week).
But what calls forth the greatest fury in these preservers of “political correctness” is the cross—the sign of love and forgiveness. In September of last year the administration of a public hospital in the English town of Exeter forced a fifty-four year old nurse, Shirley Chaplin, to remove her cross, threatening to fire her, although Miss Chaplin had been working in the hospital for thirty years. They told her that “the cross violates the dress code, and jewelry is not allowed at work.”
In spring of 2009, another nurse, Helen Slatter from Gloucester had to take off her cross because “the cross can bring infection into the hospital.” But the true triumph of antichrist could be considered the Strasbourg trial of November, 2009, which forbade crucifixes in Italian schools. One of those who supported this decision was a famous Italian journalist and former member of the European Parliament, Giulietto Chiesa.
Why Should My Son Look at the Cross?
“The Vatican is trespassing over the boundaries of religious problems, especially with this Pope, Benedict XVI,” said journalist Giulietto Chiesa. In Europe there is a rule: the Church is free, but the state is also free. Take, for example, the question of the Christian roots of Europe. I was categorically against any mention of a Christian past in the European Constitution.” “But this is an inarguable fact," I remarked, "Europe does have Christian roots.” “So what? Why does it need to be emphasized? We should respect all religions. The European Union is a political structure, and does not have a religious character.”
“In Russia we frown upon people who do not respect or remember their roots; and you want to cross out the fact that all of European culture is founded upon Christian values!” “I belong to those who don’t want to emphasize a separate Christian civilization,” said Mr. Chiesa. “For a long time, there has been only one civilization. Globalization makes all people the same. In general, the Church too often gets into politics.” “What do you mean by that?” “We feel that abortions are a fundamental step forward, and the priests do not want this. They are against contraceptives, and that means that they are against limiting the birth rate; and the majority are for contraception. They are against divorce, while the majority of Italians have voted at the referendum for divorce. They want the cross to be in public schools. Why should my son look at the cross? The Catholic Church wants to force religious rules on the majority and place them at the head of a government that has not been Christian for a long time. In Italy alone there are two million Moslems, and in ten years there will be more of them than there are of us. Do you think that Europe should be Christian under such circumstances?” “Without a doubt," I said, "if it is guided by a preservation instinct. If you learn to respect your values and religion, then the newcomers will learn to respect them.” “In Italy and in Europe, many would consider your views to be fascist,” said Mr. Chiesa challengingly. “Apparently, to be a convinced Christian means being a fascist,” I retorted. “Wake up!," he said. "We whites are already the minority in the world! There are less than a billion of us. You can’t go against the laws of nature. We have to learn how to live with people of all skin colors and all religions. Do you want a war? We won’t win it. Or no—so have more babies or ask your God for help. The Moslems come to us because we are lazy and don’t want to do dirty work. Besides, we have taken their oil and pumped it nearly 200 years for free.”
“Yes, the Moslems have come to you, but Islam is even more strict about moral values than Christianity, and doesn’t allow any compromise,” I noted. "It is just as decisively against those abortions, contraceptives, and divorces that are so dear to your hearts. With what new religion do you liberals counter? Who are your idols and authorities?” “I do not think that there should be any authorities at all,” declared Mr. Chiesa. “Who would decide to say, ‘I am an authority?’ Live by your own mind. All attempts to create a union between the cross and the state, as you are doing in Russia, are a step backward from civilization.”
Perilous Freedom
The past two hundred years of European philosophical thought has sung praises of the only god on earth—man, while the Church has become a scapegoat that bears the burden of this philosophy’s rebellion and doubt. Striking with thought like axes, French philosophers broke through the wall of natural religiosity.
The French revolution entered history as a triumph of atheism and the revolt of human will against the treasured instinct of sanctity and thirst for God. The twentieth century, drunk with the successes of science, went even further, tearing off life’s brilliant covering with a rabid hatred, desiring to show her naked and explainable without miracles. At the beginning of the new century, European churches have become depopulated, and the confessionals, those little houses where the faithful came to dump their sins, stand empty.
“Philosophical attacks against the Church have led man to decide that he alone is the judge and master of life,” said the famous journalist and Vatican expert for the Italian newspaper, La Stampa, Marco Toccati. “It is I, Marco, who decides what is good and evil, right and wrong. People are now educated and raised in the total assurance that they are the only judges, and that the meaning of life is comfort and pleasure. Individualism and the longing for pleasure is the basic source of the decline of religion. The Church makes a stand against egoistic comfort and infringes upon it. It says unpleasant things: a person has duties and responsibilities before God for his actions; he should work and take care of others, and not all of his pleasures are right. Man feels his authority over nature, and he is told, ‘You are not the master, you are only a part of the greater picture.’ Man says, ‘I create life, I make a child, and if I don’t want him, I simply kill him,’ and the Church insists that it’s a sin. In a word, the Church bothers everyone. In Italy, 130,000 abortions are committed per year. Women want to live for themselves, and kill their infants in the womb, while 35 to 40 percent decide to have a child, but you can’t fool nature. Now very few children are being born to Christians while many are born to immigrant families. Moslems still believe in the family, have their own very strong values that we do not like—but they are having children and we are not. We have gotten lost in the world of good and evil. After the French Revolution, freemasonry, and the advent and fall of communism, people do not know what truths need to be defended. I remember how during the time of the USSR, the communist party in Italy spoke of moral values and was deeply close to the Church. But now even the communists are confused: they cannot defend the structure that has been critically judged in its native land, in Russia. This is the cause of ambiguity in their ethical principles: first the communists forbade everything, and now they allow everything.
“Thus, from a very strictly controlled society we have gone to a completely free society. Each is free to do what he wants, and from Strasbourg and Brussels is coming in an uninterrupted attack upon traditional values. However, all of these neo-liberals are unaware that the rights of man that they are defending were born from Christianity. They do not know where their roots are.
“Practicing Christians have been the minority for a long time,” a representative of the Vatican, Padre Federico Lombardy, says bitterly. “The Church is going against the mainstream in society. Now everyone has his own truth. ‘All positions are equal, no one has any privileges, and you cannot claim to have the only truth’—that is what the mass media repeats to people. There is no ruler, no authority, no truth, no light, and no institution that has the right to teach and instruct.”
“Europe has been a place of harsh, anti-theistic civilization over the course of the past three centuries,” says the Russian political scientist, Alexander Lugin. “The Catholic Church has irreparably lost all the social battles long ago; it has not kept society under its control. What is happening now is a rearguard battle, the fifteenth act of a long serial about the de-Christianization of society. The current Pope is a steadfast conservative, and he is being attacked by these rabid, vile liberals. The late John Paul was part of a plan against the USSR, against the Soviet block, and they put up with him. Now there is a battle to the death going on. So that people would not rebound to the Church, the Church is being discredited. The crisis of the liberal, post-Christian, demonized, Western society, sunk in all forms of vice, makes the coming of antichrist unavoidable. It suffices to look at the faces of modern secular government representatives, to hear what they are preaching, and it becomes clear: we are talking about the last times.”
Darya Aslamova
Translated by Pravoslavie.ru/OrthoChristian.com
