Monday 5 August 2013

Putin: Defend Christians Worldwide

The unlikely Christian voice: Russia's Vladimir Putin
“Bury me on my head, for very soon this world will be turned upside down." ~ GK Chesterton


According to Life Site News...

'Vladimir Putin has urged the world’s political leaders to stop the violent persecutions against Christians that have erupted in many Middle Eastern countries. Speaking at a meeting with Orthodox Christian leaders in Moscow last week, the Russian President said he noted “with alarm” that “in many of the world’s regions, especially in the Middle East and in North Africa inter-confessional tensions are mounting, and the rights of religious minorities are infringed, including Christians and Orthodox Christians.”

“This pressing problem should be a subject of close attention for the entire international community,” Putin said. “It is especially important today to make efforts to prevent intercultural and interreligious conflicts, which are fraught with the most serious upheavals.”

Putin praised the growth of cooperation between the Orthodox Churches and the Russian state, saying, “We act as genuine partners and colleagues to solve the most pressing domestic and international tasks, to implement joint initiatives for the benefit of our country and people.”

The Russian Federation recently passed legislation making it illegal to promote homosexuality as normal, a move that, while condemned by many European leaders, was strongly supported by the Orthodox Church.
Persecuted: Christians in Syria
Putin added Thursday that the Church was giving Russians a moral compass when so many were looking for help. “Today when people are once again searching for moral support, millions of our compatriots see it in religion,” he said. “They trust the wise, pastoral word of the Russian Orthodox Church.”

He added that it was the Church that was ultimately responsible for the development and rise of “culture and education” in Russia over the last 1,000 years. “The adoption of Christianity became a turning point in the fate of our fatherland, made it an inseparable part of the Christian civilization and helped it turn into one of the largest world powers,” Putin said.

Simple vestments: Orthodox Patriarch Kirill
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, said at the same meeting that the attempts to push Christians out of Syria would lead to a “civilization catastrophe.” Kirill and other Orthodox leaders have been critical of the lack of response to the crisis facing Christians in the Middle East by US and other Western leaders.

The meeting was held with the leaders of all 15 Orthodox Churches to commemorate the 1,025th anniversary of the “Baptism of Russia” – the official adoption of Christianity and establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kievan Rus by Prince Vladimir in 988 A.D.

Orthodox leaders at the meeting also condemned the growing secularist suppression of Christian freedoms in non-Muslim countries like Britain, where “gay marriage” has just been created.

Metropolitan Hilarion, the Russian Orthodox Church’s chief ecumenical officer, said “secularization in disguise of democratization” is leading Western nations toward totalitarianism. He spoke of a “powerful energy today [that] strives to finally break with Christianity, which controlled its totalitarian impulses during 17 centuries.”

Metropolitan Hilarion said, “Eventually, it unconsciously strives to set up an absolute dictatorship that demands total control over each member of society. Don’t we move to it when ‘for the sake of security’ we agree to obligatory electronic passports, dactyloscopy [fingerprint identification] for everyone, and photo cameras occurring everywhere?”
No surprises there, then.
He highlighted the attempt to create same-sex “marriage” in France, which he called an attempt to make “immorality normal,” saying, that the French government has “consciously and demonstratively ignored demands of people and used tear gas to disperse them.”
Later, at a reception in Kiev, Putin and Patriarch Kirill took part in a prayer service with Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych. He urged the leaders of Ukraine to turn towards a greater unity with Russia, and away from its overtures to the European Union, citing a natural cultural and spiritual relationship that is not present with the heavily secularist EU.

Patriarch Kirill added that it is the Orthodox religion that creates genuine unity between Slavic peoples. “Our ancestors adopted the Christian faith and, together with it, a system of values and morals…that no historical upheavals were able to destroy,” he said. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians have a shared spiritual foundation that unites them more than their national boundaries divide them.

Patriarch Kirill said of the same-sex “marriage” fad sweeping the Western world, “This is a very dangerous apocalyptic symptom, and we must do everything so that sin is never validated by the laws of the state in the lands of Holy Rus, because this would mean that the people are starting on the path of self-destruction.”

News reports like this render me speechless. Why cannot Western leaders defend Christianity and Christian civilisation?

5 comments:

M said...

"Why cannot Western leaders defend Christianity and Christian civilisation?"

It is not in the interests of the Western leaders, because they are anti-Christian adherents of liberal secularism and couldn't care less about Christianity, traditions, and the like.

Mike Cliffson said...

cf Crimean War, Damascus 19th cent, etc

BJC said...

This is a really interesting development. Putin seeks to unite the Slavs around Christianity. I remember talking to a Russian once who told me Russians regarded the Slavs down in the former Yugoslavia as "brothers" and that's why he was supporting Croatia in a Croatia vs England football match. You could see the passion and seriousness in his face as well. He himself was ethnically Slav and his parents were from Croatia.

This also has the potential to get sympathy from people in the EU, i.e., mainly Christians, who are looking for moral leadership and to divide the West. Something which Putin will be only too aware of. This is the thing about the whole LGBT business. They think they will get 'victory in our time' but it will never work like that. It will just trigger off a whole new series of alliances.

Andrew said...

'In 1925 the Soviet foreign minister, Georgy Chicherin, a friend of the future pope since Pacelli’s days as papal nuncio in Germany, argued that communism would defeat capitalism, but the church might indeed endure and prevail against all secular ideologies. "Rome will prove a harder nut to crack. If Rome did not exist, we would be able to deal with all the various branches of Christianity. They would capitulate before us. Without Rome, religion would die."'

"Not Hitler's Pope", by JOHN RODDEN AND JOHN ROSSI: The American Conservative, July 17, 2013

Full article at:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/not-hitlers-pope/

The left despises the Catholic Church because it's the only force on earth that can resit their demonic machinations.

Elizabeth said...

Isn't Putin a bit of a surprise? Check out this short bit on The Eye-Witness blog about Putin:

http://theeye-witness.blogspot.com/2013/08/vladimir-putin-2016.html

It's short and well worth a read!

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