Free Republic

This is a nice problem to have to solve.Details (via Google translate): With faulty acoustics and its 200 seats, the former cathedral of St. Olav, consecrated in 1973 no longer met the needs of the Catholic community in Trondheim, Norway’s third largest city.While in 1973 there were only 500 Catholics in the city and its surroundings, they are now more than 6,000, arrived with the oil boom and economic prosperity. The city also has a technical university that attracts foreign students and researchers. “Today there are more than 25% of Norwegian origin” among registered Catholics in the diocese of...

For the first time in a millennium, as I said, the Arabs are in charge for their own affairs, responsible for their own affairs. (...)Khomeini in one of his writings talks about the need to drive out the Americans and that little protégé, the illegitimate offspring, he calls it, in the region.(...) In much of the Islamic world the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union is seen as an Islamic victory.

Britain's Prince Charles has warned that Christianity might be entirely erased from the land of its birth in the Middle East within five years. "Their suffering is symptomatic of a very real crisis which threatens the very existence of Christianity in the land of its birth," Charles said at the Archbishop House in central London, reported the Express on Thursday. "In fact according to Aid to the Church in Need, which is a truly remarkable organization, Christianity is on course to disappear from Iraq within five years unless emergency help is provided on a greatly increased scale at an international...

When President Obama unveiled the U. S. Department of Education's new college scorecard, he indicated it would be inclusive, reviewing every school. Well, they missed three--Christendom, Hillsdale and Grove City College. Officials at the Department of Education informed Hillsdale's administrators that they didn't make the list because the college did not confer enough 4-year degrees, something Hillsdale has been doing since the 19th Century. The DOE claimed that Grove City College (GCC) did not make the list because the college did not provide Title IV funds, GCC president Paul McNulty said at the Heritage Foundation on Monday November 16. Ironically,...

Western countries do not identify themselves with the Christian tradition and harass those who defend Christian values, said Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill on Wednesday at a meeting with US preacher Franklin Graham at the St. Daniel Monastery. "Russian Church during the Cold War was actively developing relations with Western Christians. We were living in difficult conditions of atheistic ideology and perceived Western civilization as Christian civilization. We appreciated the freedom in which they lived, Christians in the West, and considered them our brothers and allies" - said the Patriarch. He stressed with regret that in recent years...

The death of Europe is in sight. Still hazy and not yet inevitable, but nevertheless visible and drawing nearer—like a distant planet in the lens of an approaching satellite. Europe is reaching its end not because of its sclerotic economy, or stagnant demography, or the dysfunctions of the superstate. Nor is the real cause the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Those desperate people are just the latest stiff breeze against the timber of a desiccated civilization. Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for...

Whilst many people remember Sept. 11 2001 for the Islamic terrorist attack on the USA and also the Western world by extension, few people are aware of another significant battle that saved Western Christendom for many generations that also occurred on Sept. 11 and Sept. 12 1683: The Battle of Vienna. It was this very battle that we in the West have reaped the benefits of and taken for granted but few know or bother to know the details. It will be my sincere attempt to not simply bring out the details of the Battle but rather, to seek to...

The Islamic State has managed to destroy two thousand years of Christian civilization in the Middle East in just a couple of years, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters noted on The O’Reilly Factor last week. And he placed the blame squarely on President Obama’s cowardly, feckless, incompetent foreign policy.ISIS has been spreading across the Middle East like a plague of locusts, and as they have spread, they have targeted religious minorities, particularly Christians, for destruction. In Syria, tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians have been attacked and displaced.They are the forgotten refugees.A Catholic priest who visited Kurdish Iraq last fall described...

“Let me put it a different way. During the rule of Communism, Russia found itself in the grip of a culture of death, but she is returning to life, in the sense of Christian culture with a strong awareness of the historical roots and continuity.” The situation in the West is the complete opposite. We celebrate death and have surrendered to the satanic view of man in a self-righteous rage and rant against God. We can divorce with ease on-line. We prioritise work and career above family responsibilities especially raising children. We favour euthanasia, abortion on demand, homosexual rights and...

Once a solid, vibrant Lutheran stronghold, Scandinavia today is probably the most secularized region of the Western world. Spiritually, Scandinavians have become “the people that dwell in darkness.” Scandinavia is filled with large, beautiful, empty churches. This has not happened by accident. . . It is probably the case today that a randomly selected African has a better chance than a randomly selected Scandinavian of hearing the Gospel clearly preached.  There was a time when every Swede was Lutheran from birth by law, and no other denomination was permitted. The Church of Sweden took to calling itself Den Svenska...

(The link is to a map supposedly showing the spread of world religions through time. Conveniently, It fails to show that Palestine, North Africa or the Middle East was Christianized prior to Mohammed, or, in fact, ever. This is the BS the machine is spreading as fact.) Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are five of the biggest religions in the world. Over the last few thousand years, these religious groups have shaped the course of history and had a profound influence on the trajectory of the human race. 

At the level of sweeping stereotypes, most Westerners tend to think of India and its dominant religion, Hinduism, as bastions of tolerance. Ever since the Beatles traveled to an ashram to study meditation, there’s been a chic about Indian spirituality as the ultimate in “all paths lead to the same place.”One might profitably ask Christians in today’s India, however, whether those stereotypes have anything to do with their reality. The answer you’re likely to get is, “Are you kidding?”In truth, India’s small Christian minority has felt under the gun for a long time, and they say things have become considerably...

>Tuesday, July 14 probably passes without much fanfare in your home, but the date, Bastille Day, marks the beginning of the greatest organized persecution of Christians since the Emperor Diocletian. This day, the beginning of the French Revolution, also planted the seeds for the murderous ideologies of socialism and nationalism that would poison the next two centuries, murdering millions of believers and other innocent civilians. Between them, those two political movements racked up quite a body count: In Death By Government, scholar R. J. Rummel pointed out thatduring the first 88 years of this century, almost 170,000,000 men, women and...

The five patriarchs of Antioch at their June 8 meeting in Damascus. Credit: Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch via Facebook/Antiochpatriarchate.org Damascus, Syria, Jun 10, 2015 / 12:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The five Christian patriarchs of Antioch met in Syria on Monday, calling for peace in the Syrian civil war while reaffirming that Christians have a place in the Middle East. The Christian leaders described themselves as an authentic people of the land, who are “deeply rooted in its earth that was watered by the sweat of our fathers and grandfathers, and we confirm more than ever that we are staying.”...

Why are parts of Germany formerly under the enforced secularism of the Communist party rediscovering charismatic religion? In its story of May 16, 2015, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel carried a story tiled (on its cover at least) “Are Evangelicals Winning the World?” [That is my translation. The German wording is “Are Evangelicals conquering…” I substituted the less martial-sounding English “winning”. To the best of my knowledge, there is a remarkable scarcity of Evangelical suicide bombers.] The story states that Evangelical congregations are generally growing in Germany. But it concentrates on two congregations: one in Stuttgart, in western Germany, the...

Tear down that cross and toss it in the wood chipper because the American church is toast. So goes conventional wisdom after recent revelations from the Pew Research Center, which found that in just 7 years, the percentage of Christians in the United States dropped nearly 8 points. The news was met with uncontrolled fits of glee from liberal publications like Salon, where author Patricia Miller gloated that the benefits from the decline of Christianity would be, “huge.” No doubt the scores of natural disaster victims around the globe who have profited from all the atheist relief trucks rolling in...

The culture war against Christianity is picking up speed. Last week came word Saint Louis University will remove a heroic-sized statue of Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet S.J. from the front of Fusz Hall, where it has stood for 60 years. The statue depicts Fr. De Smet holding aloft a crucifix as he ministers to two American Indians, one of whom is kneeling. Historically, the statue is accurate. Fr. De Smet, "Blackrobe," as he was known, was a 19th-century missionary to Indian tribes who converted thousands. A friend of Sitting Bull, he spent his last years in St. Louis. And as...

Do you remember the joke about the Irish brewery worker who drowned in a vat of suds? “Poor Sean,” the new widow said upon learning her husband’s fate, “He didn’t stand a chance.” “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Reilly,” replies the foreman. “He did crawl out three times to use the bathroom.”The Republic of Ireland has just voted, by a commanding and unprecedented popular vote, to establish “gay marriage” in its territory. The world, and the Irish themselves, who generally look at themselves from the viewpoint of the foreigner in a sad kind of “double consciousness,” will not fail...

. . . but there is less here than meets the eye. At first, the numbers seem alarming, and there is an alarming element to it. Since the last time such a poll was taken in 2008, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped from 78 percent to 70 percent. Yes, 70 percent is still an overwhelming majority, but an 8 percent drop in just seven years is pretty big. So how does one account for those one-time devoted followers of Jesus Christ suddenly abandoning the Kingdom of God? One doesn’t, because that’s not what’s really happened here....

The Christian share of adults in the United States has declined sharply since 2007, affecting nearly all major Christian traditions and denominations, and crossing age, race and region, according to an extensive survey by the Pew Research Center. Seventy-one percent of American adults were Christian in 2014, the lowest estimate from any sizable survey to date, and a decline of 5 million adults and 8 percentage points since a similar Pew survey in 2007.