When I was growing up and “The Evil Empire” – the Soviet
Union – was still very much alive and well, my mother told my siblings and I – as I believe
many Catholic mothers told their kids during that time – to pray for the
conversion of Russia .
This was in keeping with what Mother Mary relayed in some of her apparitions
around the world: most famous, I think, to the children in Fatima , Portugal Russia
would not spread her atheistic errors around the world and would return to God.
“I imagined I was lying in this very wattle shed and my dead
parents, father and mother come to me and bow to me but they do not say
anything. And I ask them: ‘Why are you bowing to me father and mother? ‘Well’,
they say, ‘because having suffered much in this world you not only lightened
your own soul but have also taken a great weight off us. And it is much easier
for us now in the other world. You have already done away with your sins; now
you are conquering our sins.”
In the manuscript of this story he was preparing for
publication, Turgenev struck out another of Lukerya’s visions in which a
multitude of serfs beg her to suffer for them, for their freedom. The
redemptive quality of suffering is a very Christian concept. For Christians,
suffering is not meaningless but can help purify us for the Kingdom of God
How it came to pass that this nation with a strong Christian
identity was blindsided, taken hostage, and persecuted by the atheistic
Marxists from 1918 until the collapse of the Soviet Union
is another story: but they were. As churches were destroyed or turned into
atheist museums or warehouses, and the clergy was murdered and atheism
promoted, the faith of the people went underground. Alexander Yakovlev, a
disillusioned communist, documented in his book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, that three thousand members
of the clergy were shot in the first year of the Russian Revolution. “The
Metropolitan of Kiev was mutilated and castrated, his naked corpse left to be
desecrated in the street. The Metropolitan of St.
Petersburg, in line to succeed the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church,
was doused with water and left to freeze to death.” Tens of thousands of
religious were sent to concentration camps with few returning. And the worst
was yet to come in the 1920’s under Stalin.
Why were the Bolsheviks’, people who professed not to
believe in God, so ruthless in their campaign of violence against believers?
Was it because, as novelist and Gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said,
“The entire twentieth century was sucked into the vortex of atheism and
self-destruction” due to “Men having forgotten God”? But why would deniers in
the existence of something (namely God) lead them to try to eradicate the
believers of that something? Archbishop Fulton Sheen has an answer in his 1967
book Footprints in a Darkened Forest:
“What is it that gives substance to the violence of their atheism if it be not
the reality of the object which is attached?” “How could there be atheists
unless there were something to ‘atheate’? All atheists would be fools fighting
against imaginary windmills if God did not exist. They are capable of
denouncing sacred ideals, of blaspheming and deriding the truth they have
worshipped, only because, fundamentally they believe in God. Men can not be so
violent against myths. Only the reality of the Christ whom they hate saves them
from being fools fighting a figment of the imagination.”
So it would seem that militant atheists are not really
atheists at all, but, as Fulton Sheen says, “antitheists”. It isn’t that they,
at a basic level, do not believe in the existence of God, but that they reject
and hate God. This is what a young man once wrote:
I want to know You, Unknown One,
You who are reaching deep into my soul
And ravaging my life, a savage gale.
You Inconceivable yet Related One!
I want to know You – even serve.
That young man, Friedrich Nietzsche, later became famous by
declaring that God was dead.
I must have still been in my teens when I heard about an
ungrateful Russian dissident that the United States gave political asylum
to who criticized his benefactors in a speech. I never heard the speech, but
thought what an ingrate this guy, Solzhenitsyn, was for biting his saviors’
hand. But it turns out he was holding his Savior’s hand and cautioning the West
against going down the path his beloved country went down. Solzhenitsyn wrote
of Marx and Lenin, “Hatred of God is the principal driving force, more
fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.” Dostoevsky had
prophetically warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us
intellectually unprepared.” That is exactly what happened decades later when
the Bolsheviks systematic campaign of atheistic violence – unprecedented in
human history – swept Russia .
A different kind of atheistic revolution is occurring in the U.S. and other Western countries
today. The people of the West are intellectually unprepared for the systematic
attacks on its Christian foundation: and it is being waged in the name of
equality and rights. Unlike the bloody era that ushered in and established the Soviet Union , the new revolution is a bloodless one…at
least for those outside their mothers’ wombs. While the U.S. has turned its
passions inwards and obsesses about “abortion rights” and “marriage equality”,
Orthodox leaders like Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev have looked outward by challenging
Russian President Vladimir Putin to make the protection of Christians in the
Middle East a priority. Putin’s response? “So it will be.” Alfeyev called upon
the international community “to create a mechanism [in] defense of Christians
in the Middle East”, which would make economic aid contingent upon “guarantees [of
safety] for Christian minorities.”
In my last blog entry I quoted the former Chief Rabbi of the
United Kingdom, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, as saying, “Until recently, Christians
represented 20 percent of the population of the Middle East; today, 4 percent.
This is one of the greatest crimes of our time, but it has gone almost
unreported and unprotected.” He also said it is “the religious equivalent of
ethnic cleansing”. So is it any small wonder in the deafening silence of the
West that Christians in the Middle East are turning toward Russia as their defender? Lady
Warsi, the Minister of Faith who sits on Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet
in the U.K.
says that “A mass exodus is taking place, on a Biblical scale. In some places
there is a real danger that Christianity will become extinct.” “There are parts
of the world today where to be a Christian is to put your life in danger”, she
writes. “From continent to continent, Christians are facing discrimination,
ostracism, torture, even murder, simply for the faith they follow.”
How have the Western countries responded to the crises
affecting the Middle Eastern Christians? By ignoring the problem. The leader of
the most powerful nation in the world, a nation which used to call itself
Christian, refused to meet with Egyptian Coptic Christians at the White House
for fear of offending the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s right, President Obama
would not meet with members of the oldest church in the world – founded in 50AD
– to hear how their community was being targeted by the Muslim majority. The
Muslim Brotherhood has been actively persecuting the Copts by burning down
their churches, schools, and in some instances murdering them: and were recently
declared a terrorist organization by the current Egyptian military rulers. The
Wests’ abandonment to the plight of these Christian minorities has not gone
unnoticed by them, and they are turning to Russia for help. “About 50,000
Syrian Christians want to apply for Russian citizenship,” states one news
article on October 16, 2013. “In a letter to the Russian Foreign Ministry, they
said that they were not planning to flee Syria ,
but if threatened with physical elimination, they would pin their hopes on Russia
as the guarantor of their survival.” The letter says that “the West-backed
terrorists are prepared to go to any lengths to wipe Christians out of Syria ”, and that they “see Russia as the guarantor of peace
and stability”. The article concludes by stating that “According to the Pew
Forum on Religion and Public Life research organization, Christians are
persecuted and harassed in 130 countries. Today, Christians are the most
persecuted religious community. Every hour, one Christian is killed in the
world. They are killed because of their faith.”
I recall that the day before the Al Shebaab gunmen in Kenya attacked a shopping mall in September,
Islamists bombed All Saints Catholic Church in Pakistan : killing 85 congregants. I
listened to the radio almost in vain the following days to hear updates on that
attack, but the news outlets only reported on the mall attack with virtually no
mention of the church bombing (with one exception). I don’t know how the
bombing faired on television. As much as the mall attack was covered, one would
think that our media would mention one important fact: that the terrorists
asked the Muslim hostages to leave before murdering the 61 civilians. But I
never heard it. That information only came out through the alternative media.
Yes, Al Shebaab wanted their victims to be Christians.
The impotence of the West to acknowledge, let alone address,
the purging of Christians from the Middle East
is a direct result of their rejection of God and Christianity. When many of us
think of atheistic communism we think of a destructive ideology emanating from
the Soviet Union : but this was not so. As
Archbishop Fulton Sheen pointed out in one of his TV broadcasts decades ago,
“There is not a single philosophic principal in communism that did not come
from the West. The philosophy came from Germany . The sociology came from France . The
economics came from England .
Russia
gave it an Asiatic soul, and power, and force. Communism is coming back to the
West because something died in the Western world.” That something is God.
So in light of the moralizing but spiritually vacuous West
abdicating its responsibility to speak out on behalf of persecuted Christian
minorities throughout the world, it is a small wonder that Russia, the former
heart of the godless “evil empire”, now considers the West as being godless. “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved
away from their roots, including Christian values.” President Putin said in a
recent keynote speech. “Policies are being pursued that place on the same level
a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in
Satan. This is the path to degradation.” Portraying Russia as a staunch defender of
traditional values against a morally bankrupt West, Mr. Putin has said that
social and religious conservatism is the only way to prevent the world from
slipping into chaotic darkness. The leader of the Orthodox Church, Patriarch
Kirill I of Moscow
agrees and accuses the West of engaging in “spiritual disarmament” of their
people. “The general political direction of the [Western political] elite
bears, without doubt, an anti-Christian and anti-religious character.” “We have
been through an epoch of atheism, and we know what it is to live without God.
We want to shout to the whole world, STOP!”
We need to heed Dostoevsky’s warning to Russia that “great
events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared”. The
rejection of God in the West, and an ignorance or superficial understanding of
our Christian faith and heritage, is crippling our ability to defend ourselves
against powerful modern cultural trends. While the United States still has the body of
a strong man, the soul is being ravaged by a debilitating cancer. It is a
spiritual cancer creating an empty void. Perhaps no one understood this better
than the godfather (if you’ll excuse the term) of atheists (and antitheists):
Nietzsche. “Doubt devours me. I have killed the Law, and now it haunts me as a
cadaver haunts a living person. If I am not more than the Law, then I am among
the damned souls, the most damned.” He wrote to his sister that, “A man of
spiritual depth needs friends, unless he still has God as a Friend. But I have
neither God nor friends.”
Just as she appeared to the children of Fatima and elsewhere
around the world and asked them to pray for the conversion of Russia , I wonder if Mother Mary has been
appearing to children in Russia
and asking them to pray for the conversion of the West. If not, she might want
to. Since the West did not heed her warnings about communist Russia perhaps those in the Russian Republic
Sources:
Solzhenitsyn and the
Russian Renaissance – by Andrew Doran (July 31, 2013)
Syrian Christians
turning to Russia
Christians ‘face
extinction’ amid sectarian terror, minister warns – by Matthew Holehouse,
The Telegraph (Nov 14, 2013)
(Jan 28, 2014)
Footprints in a
Darkened Forest – by Fulton
J. Sheen, 1967
