Bucharest, March 22, 2021
Photo: basilica.ro
The wooden Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit in Bucharest’s Alexandru Ioan Cuza Park was found to be covered in graffiti on Friday.
The vandals desecrated the icons on the outer church walls with purple spray paint and wrote “LGBT,” “#BLM,” “ANTiFA,” “BE GAY DO CRIME,” and painted an anarchy symbol together with a crossed-out swastika and a crossed-out cross.
Romanian Patriarchate spokesman Vasile Bănescu described the desecration that took place Thursday night as a new blow to the tolerance so loudly claimed by various ideological groups.
“The tolerance hysterically claimed by the ideological cores of LGBT, more recently BLM or ANTIFA, strikes again. And they do what they know best: They vandalize, defile, spit out grotesque messages and, in outbursts of supreme intelligence, write their name on all the fences, including on the walls of churches,” he said, reports the Basilica News Agency.
This is another in a long series of violent acts dictated by a “hideous (neo-Marxist) eminently anti-Christian ideology” that finds favor in the media and which progressively invades and infects the Western university and social environment which has its own adherents in Romania, Bănescu said.
Fortunately, such ideas do not reign among the normal and common-sense people of traditional Romania, the Church spokesman said, but is found among an island of people “who aren’t used to holding a book, but just graffitiing with spray paint.”
The antidote to such ideologies taking root in Romania is education “in the spirit of the values of the natural, of the authentic culture, and, of course, fertile faith in God,” Bănescu concluded.
The Romanian LGBT association ACCEPT chose to focus not on the desecration of the church but on the Church spokesman’s statement, which it characterized as “inciting hatred and full of accusations against the entire LGBTI community in Romania.
In its statement, the group accuses the Romanian Orthodox Church of supporting hate for the LGBTI community over time. “These public messages do not really call for better coexistence and social peace, but rather incite spirits to ignite in public and put LGBTI people at risk of violence and discrimination,” the statement reads.
The Church should have condemned the deed but waited for an investigation before identifying any culprits, ACCEPT writes.
Last June, Black Lives Matter activists vandalized a Black Madonna Icon shrine in the Netherlands in honor of the liberation from Nazis.
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