Posted on 09/21/2018 5:12:53 PM PDT by marshmallow
On 18 September 2018, in Lisbon, A Junção do Bem Foundation organized a reception in honour of Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, who is currently on a visit to Portugal. After the reception Metropolitan Hilarion delivered an address on the Future of Christianity in Europe.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I extend my greetings to all of the conference participants. I am pleased today to be among you and have the opportunity of exchanging opinions on issues which have great significance for the Christian view of the world. One of the global problems is the future of Christianity on the continent of Europe. This topic is not only not losing its relevance, but with each year gains ever new resonance. According to statistics, Christianity is today not only the most persecuted religion (at present more than 200 million Christians are subject to persecution in more than fifty countries throughout the world),[i] but also encounters new challenges which touch upon the basic moral imperatives and traditional values.
The preaching of the Gospel appeared in Europe for the first time on the shores of the Aegean Sea. During his second missionary journey, the apostle Paul with his co-travelers, among whom was the evangelist Luke, for the first time stepped upon European soil. In Spain the first Christian communities appeared most likely in the first century AD. The apostle Paul in his epistle to the Romans expressed his intention to visit Spain (see: Rom 15.28). He preached in Rome (Acts 28.30-31) and, according to the Christian tradition, the apostle Peter also preached there. By the time of martyrdom of both of these apostles there was already a strong Christian community in Rome. In the second half of the first century Christian communities existed in many........
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Given the Moscow patriarchate’s record in persecuting other Christians, in occupying neighboring territories and turning a blind eye to the use of force against civilians including beatings of their Ukrainian Orthodox brethren...
Given their complete complicitness in the Kremlin’s corrupt and criminal shenaningans...Metropolitan Hilarion has ZERO moral authority from which to speak. Should focus on the state of his own flock.
The statement was well worth the time I spent reading it. It stands on its own despite whatever sins have been committed by his church.
I refuse to receive a history lesson from an institution that still has yet to acknowledge, repent of, and help shepherd its society into the light - away from the Satanic terrors of the Soviet Union. The legacy of which still wreaks havoc upon the souls of men all over the world — including the West today. The legacy upon which the Russian State still stands.
The bones of the Romanovs are STILL unburied and not laid to rest.
While Putin still demands that Vladimir Lenin’s body lie in open wait at his mausoleum in Red Square. Symbolic.
What a waste. By contrast, the rest of the former Soviet world including Ukraine has been de-communizing, removing its idols and other golden calfs.
I have lived in Europe. You know who is keeping Christianity alive in Europe? Who fills the pews on Sundays?
Africans. Immigrants from the formerly colonized world.
They are the ones inviting their white colleagues to church. In Germany, it is known that numerous refugees from Syria and the Islamic world have come to the faith.
We need less posturing from leadership and lectures and more Christians who actually LIVE like Christ. And LOVE God.
Not Soviet propaganda masked in religious language.
“We need less posturing from leadership and lectures and more Christians who actually LIVE like Christ. And LOVE God.”
And you think that this is best accomplished by trolling every discussion that touches on the Russian Orthodox Church? In any event given that Rome has just handed over its faithful and long suffering Catholics in China to the the Communists I am not sure you are in a position to be throwing stones here.
Europe particularly Western Europe, is Rome’s turf. The sacred heritage of the West that Europe must recover is inextricably tied to Catholicism. Any person, regardless of belief, with a heart for Western civilization understands this.
I have been extremely critical of the current Pope and the Catholic Church hierarchy. However on FR: blanket anti-Catholicism and Putinist messianism tend to be unfortunate strains co-opting much of conservative thought and discourse — leading to a self-defeating, anti-Western, nihilistic trajectory.
Eurasianist idealogues like Aleksandr Dugin who cloak their neo-Stalinism in Orthodoxy have captured the minds of leading conservative voices and thinkers. Unfortunate.
And while you may not be as critical of the Moscow patriarchate, there are Russian believers who are, and fully sympathize with Kiev’s pursuit of autocephaly.
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