Russian Orthodox Patriarch calls for a stop to the persecution of Christianity in Europe
As is known, the UK does not have an elected Prime Minister and even the Party that appointed him was elected four years ago by less than a quarter of the population. Now the European Union appears to be copying the UK’s lack of democracy and, like it, turning into a police state. Thus, on 19 November, the twenty-seven members of the EU Politburo appointed an unelected and otherwise completely unknown President of the European Soviet (‘Soviet’ means ‘Council’ in Russian). Then they appointed an unelected and otherwise unknown ‘Commissar’ as ‘High Representative for EU Foreign Policy’.
However, EU countries, through the ‘European Court of Human Rights’, have also been active in interfering in other areas of national life. We refer in particular to the Court’s ruling of 3 November against the Italian government, people and culture. In this decree it decreed that the presence of crucifixes in Italian State schools is an infringement of human rights and that they must be removed. We call this the death of a civilisation.
In response to the European Court’s ruling, His Holiness Kyrill, Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, has sent a letter to the Italian Prime Minister, wholeheartedly supporting him in his intention to appeal against the ruling. In it he declared: ‘European democracy must not encourage the hatred of Christianity, likening itself to the atheist regimes of the past’. The Patriarch added that the verdict had ‘set off alarm bells’ in the Russian Orthodox Church, which was for three generations subject to just such anti-religious ideology. This ideology led to the greatest and most brutal religious persecution in history, with 600 bishops, over 100,000 priests, monks and nuns and millions of laypeople martyred.
It should be recalled that several million Russian Orthodox live in EU countries, notably in Germany, Italy, the UK, France, Benelux, Portugal, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Sweden, Finland, and Ireland. This does not include the other Orthodox populations in Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus and the million-strong Orthodox minority in Poland. Together they form an EU Orthodox population of some forty million, 8% of the total.
Patriarch Kyrill pointed out in his letter that ‘the Christian heritage of Italy and other European countries should not be subjected to the scrutiny of human rights organisations’. ‘Christian symbols’, said the Patriarch, ‘are part of a general European identity, without which neither the past, nor the present, nor the future of Europe is conceivable’. He also stated: ‘To use guarantees of the secular character of the State as excuses to institute an anti-religious ideology clearly destroys social harmony and discriminates against the religious majority of Europe – Christians’.
