Posted on 04/23/2012 7:06:23 AM PDT by kronos77
Tens of thousands of Orthodox Christians have joined a service outside Moscow’s main church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, in defense of their faith, sacred objects and the Church itself, following recent numerous attacks on Christian relics.
The Sunday service has gathered around 65 thousand worshippers, according to official police data. It comes in response to what the church says is a series disrespectful acts against Orthodoxy and religious faith over the past few months.
Sacred Orthodox objects attacked this spring were specially brought to the Cathedral for one day.
Among the relics is a 3.5-metre-tall crucifix cut by an attacker in the cathedral of the city of Nevinnomyssk in Russia’s south. There are also five of the 30 icons cut with an ax in the town of Veliky Ustyug in March. And the Virgin Mary icon, shot with bullets in the early 1920s, was also brought from the same city.
Worshippers also denounce other cases of vandalism – in March, the Cathedral of St. Sergius of Radonezh in the city of Mozyr was desecrated with blasphemous inscriptions and sacrilege against the representationof the cross. In April, offenders poured gasoline and set fire to the entrance door to the Cathedral of Demetrius of Thessalonica in Krasnodar. In the Rostov Region, on the eve of Easter, vandals smeared black paint on the walls of a chapel built in memory of those who died in the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, as well as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.
In February, the activists of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot broke into Moscow’s main cathedral and sang blasphemous songs at the altar.
(Excerpt) Read more at rt.com ...
God Bless Christians everywhere...Christianity is now the most oppressed religion in the world...
Koba would have been a fan of theirs'
Russia is the one place in Europe where faith and belief appear to actually be on the increase.
Sometimes they thrive under adversity better than elsewhere.
You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I The Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love Me and keep My Commandments.”
“You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above....”
.
To Christians, God made a graven image of Himself in the form of Jesus Christ.
That is why, Christians dared to make images of God ever since the first century AD.
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