The Christian Peoples of Western Europe appear to be dying out
Fr Philaret (Bulekov), the official representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in Strasbourg has commented that the ‘physical survival’ of Western Europeans is closely linked to their ‘return to their Christian roots’. In an interview to be published on Monday in the magazine ‘Expert’ he expressed his concern that ‘only a profoundly religious perception of life in God’s world, where every new life enriches all who are involved in it and take part in it can avert a situation in which the Christian peoples of Western Europe die out’.
He added that ‘those who do not believe in anything, egoistic consumers, shirking any kind of hard work, which they over-entrust to alien immigrants, doom themselves not only to spiritual death, but also to physical disappearance’. He said that the presence of Muslims in Western Europe is not only a challenge for ‘the heirs of the great Christian tradition’, but is also ‘an invitation to them in the face of new waves of immigration to return not only to the faith of their fathers, but to the very essence of that faith’.
He continued: ‘We must realise the harmfulness of life lived according to the laws of individual consumption of goods and services and discover the forgotten truth of the spiritual meaning of life and the value of human contacts. This can only happen before the Living God, the mystery of our existence, hallowed by the light of Christ’. He commented that although this was not easy for a secularised society, ‘the fate of Europe and millions of its people depends on the ability of native Europeans to deal with this fact’. He also underlined another obvious fact, affirming that ‘conscious, real Church Christians in Europe are a minority’.
Fr Philaret’s comments, which only confirm what we have been saying for nearly forty years, come a few days after the distribution of tens of thousands of copies of the official EU calendar, which purposely contains no mention of Christmas of Easter. This is surely yet another sign of the inherently militantly atheistic nature of the new European Union, which every day more and more seems to resemble the old Soviet Union.
