Posted on 10/20/2012 7:19:37 AM PDT by NYer
.- Some 40 Soviet propaganda posters against Christianity will soon be displayed at Denver’s Catholic cathedral as part of an exhibit dedicated to religious liberty.
“These posters remind us that societies can turn very deadly when you have a kind of radical secularism which manifests in an anti-Christian attitude … you see it in all its ugliness through the lens of these posters,” Father Doug Grandon told CNA Oct. 17.
The posters displayed at the cathedral are part of the collection of Fr. Grandon, parochial vicar at St. Thomas More parish in Centennial, Colo.
The October 1917 revolution in Russia led to the atheistic, communist government of the Soviet Union which hoped to eradicate religion, and in particular the Catholic Church, from its empire.
To do this, the government produced thousands of different propaganda posters which denigrated Christianity and which the Soviet Central Committee described in 1931 as “a powerful tool in the reconstruction of the individual, his ideology, his way of life, his economic activity.”
Between 1919 and 1922, 7.5 million of these posters were distributed in the Soviet Union. As many as 250,000 copies of a given poster could be made in the 1930s. The propaganda posters continued to be made through 1983.
The posters showing the Bolshevik worldview fall into three basic categories: icons of the worker, women, and the enemy. The Soviet government also produced anti-religious cartoons and postcards.
The posters contain such imagery as Lenin sweeping clergy from the earth, hypocritical priests, and Christians as sheep being fleeced by their priests.
A poster from 1965 shows a young woman throwing out her icons while she watches a satellite in space on television. The poster says, “the bright light of science has proven there is no God.”
Fr. Grandon first encountered the posters at a flea market in Moscow in 1999. “When I first saw them I was fascinated by the blatant and ugly attack on religion that the posters represented,” he recalled.
He believes the posters are important for Coloradans to see because they “give us a warning that this could happen again. Where you have a disrespect for the freedom of religion, a rampant kind of secularism, this could happen again.”
“If we forget these horrific historical examples, and if we become lethargic in our political involvement, our prayers, in our practice of religion, our culture could be lost. It could happen even here.”
The communist government of the Soviet Union suppressed the Russian Orthodox Church and appropriated control over its institutions in 1917, killing over 1,200 clergy and 12,000 laymen in the process. Fr. Grandon reported that many remaining clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church became informants for the KGB.
The Russian Orthodox Church was allowed to operate openly again in 1945.
The Catholic Church was attacked in 1923, and by the end of the decade it had virtually disappeared from the U.S.S.R.
In 1946, all property of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church, and that Church was not allowed to operate again until 1989.
Fr. Grandon described Soviet religious persecution as “not just on religion, but an attack on the human spirit, freedom, capitalism, human aspirations. It really did destroy the human spirit of the average Russian.”
He noted that even today, very few Russians practice any religion, and the country suffers from alcoholism, divorce, and devastating abortion rates.
“Communism really was devastating to the human soul, and they're still experiencing the consequences of that,” said Fr. Grandon.
Fr. Grandon is on the board of the Mary Mother of God Mission Society, which works to revive the Catholic Church in Far Eastern Russia.
“Protect Freedom of Religion” will be exhibited at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception on Friday, Oct. 19 from 6 to 9 in the evening, and on Oct. 20 from 9 a.m. until noon. It is being presented by the Denver archdiocese's Office of Social Ministry.
We should create one that says... God Reagan and Economics has proven the soviet union doesnt exist.
Scientists are continually probing the Universe to see how it started.
Some say Big bang.
Who or what caused the bang?
How -—of all the thousand of pieces of rock, stone, vapor, or whatever caused the planets to come into existence was earth picked out to have all of the components to sustain life?
How did all of these components combine to form a living,intelligent being such as man, and leave the other animals as his intelligence inferior?
We can argue these points all day, but I believe there is an intelligence greater than man that formed the Universe.
We can ask where did God come from, it is unanswerable perhaps he is a part of another form of intelligence, who just wanted a plaything and we are it.
I will continue to believe in God. Others can believe anything they like. I have questions that will never be answered, but so do the unbelievers. They do not know and cannot say for certain that there is no God, I care to believe.
Science is the belief in doubt.
” Where you have a disrespect for the freedom of religion,a rampant kind of secularism,this could happen again.”
Here very soon...
We're just skipping that step.
I think of science as trying to understand how God works. Religion and Science are not incompatible, as the Left wants people to believe.
PC and the lies of Multiculturalism have gone far to denigrate religion in hopes of replacing it with a Progressive/scientific world view that nothing is good or bad—all is relative. It is a destructive poison and leads to lots of folks dying. Someday we in the USA will have some hard choices to make—how far will you go to protect the rights you have—and the rights of people you do not agree with? Like the Mexicans in the 20s we may have to take up arms to defend Christ—and spill our blood for freedom once more. Thank you Karl Marx, and Progressive/Communists! Still, some good may result in this in the end. People do not treasure what they are given for free—and by winning these rights again, may respect then more!
Someone sent this to me this morning. Very timely. We need a man who loves this country as much as Ronald Reagan did.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/OvN1jTkzXbY?rel=0
Fr. Grandon, the clearest example of a "bitter clinger" ever. What a tremendous thing he did, purchasing those posters from the Moscow flea market as proof of how the commies tried to "perfect" the "modern man" by killing God.
Russian Army parachute regiments are equipped with airdroppable portable Orthodox chapels.
They know something we don’t?
Bfl
They might as well be DNC convention posters.
Here are some modern versions
Yury Gagarin, the first man in space, to whom some similar to the above "observation" was ascribed, converted to Christianity later in life.
The liberals will BLOW A GASKET about this. They simply cannot allow any accurate information to be disseminated on the subject.
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