> Fr Duncan et.al. Happy Victoria Day. I read your comments on the EU
et.al. with interest as Ihave friends in Europe who think the EU is the
Millenium and friends in the UK who would come down on the side of Ian
Paisley (God help us!) In truth the Fundamentalists and their coterie
did no one any favours because while the 'Roman Magisterium' may not be
to their liking; what they propose/proposed to replace it with (puerile
Bibliolotry too much of the time) has been little help in a world that
needs so badly to hear the very words that you saw on the beam in the
Library. Its hard for most Americans who have not lived in a monolithic
religious atmosphere to understand what the Vatican is saying about the
role of the Church in days to come.(For them one is either with the
Church-Rome- or one is not). I have my problems with JP2 ( largely
because of his almost Manichean view of some aspects of human
interaction- to say nothing of his syncretism) but I understand that
vacuums need(and will be)filled/ filling. Could we not instead look back
to an earlier ,more Byzantine perhaps, world view and see the Church
model of authentic Anglican and Orthodox as capable of doing the same
good work without the baggage of the worst of 'Romanita'? The days
ahead-and certainly the next Pope (who I hope will be the Card.
Archbishop of Vienna)might provide the moment. Lets hope we seize it.
Blessings. GDVW+
>                                                                                                                                Scripture
as
prophesy,
but
after
the

introduction
[deleted]

by
> Professor Arthur Noble--the Paisleyite you posted on 5 May--his article
> fits in well with what you posted today--without comment--from the
> Vatican's website (Zenit.org)! (I'll add that Andrea Monda causes me to
> chuckle too!)   Of course, Professor Noble's "Inferno" would be the
> Vatican's  "Paradise."  I am reminded of the British MP in frustration
> complaining about the EEC:  "We might as well have not opposed Herr
> Hitler!" I, for one, do not pray for a return to any "reunified" version
> of the Middle Ages--culturally or economically--as Monda or the Vatican
> may envison.  Having tasted spiritual freedom, as St. Paul "really"
> says, I avoid  bondage of whatever
> stripe--Fundamentalist or Papal--as I would the plague.  I hasten to
> add, however, that biblical Fundamentalists absolutely have helped
> shatter acceptance of the Roman Magesterium and this counter-balance of
> extremes by definition opens up free inquiry.  There is a valid role for
> iconoclasts. On an oak beam in the library of The University of Texas at
> Austin, I read for the first time--as a freshman at age 16-- these
> famous words, which have meant more and more to me as the years have
> gone by:  "Hier steh' ich, ich kann nicht anders Gott helf mir!  (Here I
> stand, I can do no other.  God help me!)   On another beam nearby were
> equally influential words equally influential for me: "Ye shall know the
> truth, and the truth shall make you free!"  X  Regards
>
>
>>Brothers+
>
> This weeks schedule wont allow me much time on the internet, so I may
> not find another opportunity to post a Friday Funny.
>
> I came across this from Ian Paisleys website.  It was good for a
> chuckle. Hows this for mangling Bible Prophecy, politics, economics and
> ecumenism in one swell foop?  And after this, there is still more parts
> to come?  Have mercy!
>
> Charles+<
>
>>Pope John XXIII underlined the religio-political nature of his vision
>> for a
> new Europe when he called it "the greatest [Roman] Catholic superstate
> the world has ever known". More recently, the Papal Nuncio in Brussels
> described the EU as "a [Roman] Catholic confederation of States". United
> within the ancient boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire by the common
> spiritual bond of religion, in a burgeoning and booming industrial
> economy, situated geographically in the world's most productive
> industrial complex, its undisclosed aim is march onto the scene of world
> history as John XXIII's envisaged manifestation of "the greatest single
> human force ever seen by man".
>
> Economic flag of convenience
>
> Developments which have taken place from the Treaty of Rome (1973)
> through the Single European Act (1986) to the Maastricht Treaty (1992)
> have already made it plain that the goal of the architects of European
> Union was more than the purely economic one pretended at the beginning
> of the process. The 'Eurocrats' quickly went beyond mere economics.
> Their carefully concealed agenda was a politically united federal
> European superstate, but it was released only in small doses in order to
> deceive, condition and trap its opponents and make sure little could be
> done to stop it before it was too late.
>
> By 1999 there is to be one single currency managed by one Central Bank
> empowered to implement EU monetary policy. If the United Kingdom
> abandons the Pound Sterling and signs up to monetary union, this would
> be an irreversible step towards the complete destruction of our national
> sovereignty. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont recently
> warned that there is "no example in history of a single paper currency
> not linked to a single government" [The Daily Telegraph, Friday,
> December 20, 1996, p. 22.]; and Dr Hans Tietmeyer, President of the
> German Bundesbank, said of the consequences of monetary union: "A
> European currency will lead to member nations transferring their
> sovereignty over financial and wage policy as well as in monetary
> affairs. It is an illusion to think that states can hold on to their
> autonomy over taxation policies." [Ibid.] Is it any wonder that even
> Peter Shore, the Labour Euro-sceptic, warned that it would be "masochism
> and madness" for Britain to e
> nter the single currency? [Ibid., p. 4]
>
> Religious unity
>
> Developments in Europe are, however, not planned to end with merely
> economic and political union. The envisaged European superstate plans to
> go even further. Although  as is characteristic of the planners'
> tactics  no formal mention of the next step has yet been made or
> foreshadowed in any treaty, it is clear that the stage has been set, and
> is already well constructed, for the greatest politico-religious
> revolution ever witnessed in the history of mankind. Tragically,
> widespread indifference on the part of our national leaders, and
> especially of the leaders of the established Churches, indicates that
> they are either totally ignorant of these developments or else willing
> accomplices in this evil design. The latter explanation quite clearly
> applies to Church leaders in particular  and it is here that the hidden
> significance of the Ecumenical Movement emerges in its relationship to
> the ideal of European unity.
>
> The Roman Catholic Church has bent every effort to let the public know
> about its efforts to seek a peaceful solution of the world's ills.
> Recent Popes have published numerous encyclical letters and made many
> speeches to this end. They have traversed the globe in the guise of the
> grandiose unifier, presenting their Church to the world as a great
> peacemaking body.
>
> This is nothing new; for Rome, being true to her motto semper eadem,
> never changes. It was the Roman Church that during the Middle Ages
> established the "Pope's Peace" in which efforts were made to limit the
> number of days on which wars could be fought and to segregate civilians
> from the wanton ravages of warfare. "If the people were turbulent," Pope
> Leo XIII declared, "the Church was at once the mediator for peace."
> Whenever emperors, kings and princes "erred", the Church interposed its
> "authority".
>
> Peace and authority
>
> Pope Pius XII said in his Christmas message of 1951: "Peace [...] cannot
> be assured unless God reigns [...] in the duly organised society of
> nations"; peace, he declared, depended on "an order guaranteed by the
> Church according to her office and in her own field of action". He was
> of course reiterating Rome's traditional claim of the right to exercise
> her mandate to lead the world by the belief that Christ is declared to
> have "established on earth a society which is called the Church".
> Another Pope, Leo XIII, expressed the same idea in paragraph 8 of The
> Christian Constitution of States, when he claimed to be exercising (or,
> more accurately, arrogantly usurping) "the exalted and divine office
> which He [Christ] had received from His Father".
>
> In other words, Romanist doctrine invests the Church with power in the
> place of Christ over human affairs to regulate and control the coming
> New Order  ruling, not as Christ's instrument carrying out Christ's
> government, but by having actually taken over Christ's government. To
> deny this claimed authority, said Leo XIII, is to believe "just as if
> there were no God", and, furthermore, "it is a public crime to act as if
> there were no God".
>
> Take careful note of these statements, for they bear the hallmark of
> implied infallibility and the consequently claimed right to suppress
> dissent. The Vatican plans to give its ecclesiastical guarantee to a new
> Europe which is far removed from the democratic association of States of
> Churchill's post-War vision. The emerging Europe is the undemocratic,
> Roman Catholic superstate envisioned by De Gaulle and the Church  a
> Europe in which it is to be made "a public crime" to resist the power
> wielded by the Church in the name of God. Let it be remembered that in
> the Middle Ages such resistance was a crime punishable by death unless
> abjured, as the case of the scientist Galileo, for instance, famously
> demonstrates.
>
> For the past three quarters of a century the Popes have laid careful
> plans for this organisation which is aimed at reclaiming all those
> regions of Europe which were wrested from Rome through the Great Schism
> of the eleventh century, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth,
> and, more recently, the communisation of Eastern Europe. Before his
> death in 1903, Pope Leo XIII had already encouraged political rulers of
> whatever allegiance to re-ally themselves with the Roman Church: "To
> princes and other rulers of the State," he said, "we have offered [i.e.
> historically] the protection of [the Roman Catholic] religion. Our
> present object is to make rulers understand that this protection, which
> is stronger than any, is again offered to them [...]." It is that same
> principle that the Vatican is offering to
> present-day governments if they will submit to the Vatican's jackboot
> and return to the Romanist fold.
>
> Basic policy revealed
>
> This is not a new policy. The pontiffs virtually ruled the Western World
> for over 1200 years in the Middle Ages, and in the intervening centuries
> they successfully, and unsuccessfully, mediated between nations when
> ruling the Holy Roman Empire. For over a century, from the days of
> Garibaldi in Italy and Bismarck in Germany, the Popes have striven to
> unite European civil governments. Although the Vatican was unable to
> secure German-Italian unity despite being favourable to the Central
> Powers in World War I, in the 1930's it signed concordats with Mussolini
> and Hitler, agreements which acquired for Rome much of the freedom that
> she sought.
>
> Just as the Roman Church once imposed her order upon nations and
> peoples, she is again is seeking to re-establish her authority through
> the creation of a so-called "Christian order which alone is able to
> guarantee peace". So said the late Pope Pius XII in his 1951 Christmas
> broadcast. "To this goal," he continued, "the resources of the Church
> are now directed." In February of 1952 he arrogantly exhorted the
> faithful of Rome: "The whole world must be rebuilt from its foundation."
> Note that the resources of the entire Church are being directed toward
> this basic goal and that its cornerstone has remained the familiar goal
> of "peace".
>
> This is the gigantic task about which the world has suspected little,
> while under cover the Vatican's diplomats have been laying the
> foundations of a program planned to remake the world from its
> foundations. The plan had to be devised and carried out secretly in the
> hope that it would not be discovered until it would be too late to stop
> it.
>
> That is why few people have taken serious cognisance of the Vatican's
> peace efforts, especially following World War II, and even fewer have
> realised the true significance and goal of the ecclesiastical "peace"
> crusade. This gigantic movement has cunningly and deceptively inculcated
> in its soporific dupes the idea that its autocratic leaders are invested
> with "divine" prerogatives which must be followed as from God. The
> non-RC public is simply not aware that the basic policy of Rome is to
> re-establish her order the world by whatever foul means lies at her
> disposal.
>
> Clandestine policy-making
>
> It has taken years of undercover plotting to advance the goal of
> unifying Europe under the Romish doctrine. Preparations for the
> religious unity of the new Europe were made by the Vatican even before
> the end of the War. Because they were not recognised before much of the
> damage has been done, they could result in the absorption of millions of
> nominal Protestants into the Roman Catholic fold before they even
> realise what is happening. Many nominally Protestant Churches have
> already defected from their Reformation faith.
>
> Inter-Church dialogue  especially the activities of the World Council
> of Churches and the Ecumenical Movement  has been the major method of
> deceit employed by Rome to shepherd her enemies into her fold. These
> schemes need to be studied and exposed as a matter of urgency in the
> context of their implications for Bible Christians realised.
>
> Let us roll back the curtain of history on the more recent aspects of
> Romanism's subtle scheme. The Treaty of Rome (1973), which established
> the European Common Market, has already been mentioned. The public, in
> accordance with the Vatican's policy of releasing facts in small doses,
> was kept in the dark about the ultimate goal of this Treaty, which has
> subsequently been amended several times. When one has access to the
> great mass of the papal encyclicals and pronouncements of those years,
> startling facts begin to emerge. Above all, the concealed significance
> of the Treaty lay in the fact that it automatically tied European
> economic development to the city of Rome, gave Europe a sense of
> religious unity, and provided the Roman Catholic Church with a sense of
> protection against Communism.
>
> Rome's major stumblingblocks
>
> The Vatican has always considered the whole Continent of Europe, both
> West and East, as its territory. During his visit to the European
> Parliament in 1988 Pope John Paul II symptomatically called Eastern
> Europe "that other lung of our common European homeland" and spoke of
> his wish that Europe might "one day expand to the dimensions bestowed on
> it by geography and above all by history". It is significant that he
> cunningly avoided the word "religion".
>
> The major forces which have hitherto hampered or thwarted the full
> implementation of those expansionist plans of the Vatican have been
> collectivism (socialism, communism) and Western democracy. The former of
> these is fundamentally opposed to religion altogether, which Karl Marx
> described as "the opiate of the people"; the latter is anti-Rome in the
> different sense of being built predominantly on the principles of the
> Protestant Reformation. In simple terms, therefore, the greatest
> stumblingblocks to Rome's false religion are communism and Protestantism
>  no religion and true religion.
>
> For quite apparent reasons Rome cannot rule, firstly, over Communist
> nations. Therefore it must destroy them. Vatican aggression against the
> Socialist countries of the former East Block is already well advanced:
> East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and others, even the Soviet Union
> itself, have fallen one by one. Yugoslavia  where the particular
> historical thorn in the Vatican's flesh has been the Orthodox Serbs 
> has been successfully dismembered following the cunningly contrived
> illegal secession of the Roman Catholic Provinces of Slovenia and
> Croatia, the latter of which during World War II became a
> Fascist-Romanist mini-State, spawning the Ustashi who brutally murdered
> 240,000 Orthodox Serbs and forcibly converted 1,200,000 to the fold of
> Romanism. Support for anti-Serb terrorism in Kossovo is the current
> scene in the drama.
>
> Secondly, it is the systems of government of the democratic nations of
> the West which are irreconcilable with the authoritarianism of Rome. It
> has been a consistent teaching of the Vatican that the free consent of
> the people is not enough to confer authority on civil government; but
> although the Roman Church recognises that the ultimate source of
> authority is from God, it falsely claims to be the instrument through
> which God exercises His authority. Of Western Democracy, Pius XII said
> in his 1951 Christmas broadcast: "Its strength is not based upon true
> freedom. This is a new danger which threatens the peace, and which, in
> the light of Christian social order, We must deprecate. It is because of
> this that not a few highly placed persons in what is called the free
> world are hostile to the Church."
>
> Note here the characteristic and familiar Vatican terminology: both
> opponents of Rome  socialism and Western democracy  are rightly or
> wrongly charged with "threatening the peace" and being a "danger" to the
> RC Church.
>
> Now since neither the structure of the Communist nations nor that of the
> Western nations can be used as an instrument to establish the supremacy
> of the Vatican over the world resulting in the imposition of the "Pope's
> Peace", they must be "deprecated"  i.e. disapproved of or disfavoured,
> terminology which is in reality a Vatican euphemism for "destroyed".
>
> How, then, and through what instrument is the Church working towards
> this destruction? The answer is: through the New Europe, in which the
> convergence of Romanism and politics is manifestly increasing day by day
> and treaty by treaty. The EU is advancing by stealth towards John
> XXIII's goal of a Roman Catholic superstate. Having already achieved the
> almost complete destruction of communism, it must now continue to
> undermine the bastions of Western democracy to achieve its aim. The
> ultimate implication of this goal is the destruction of Protestantism.
>
> The assault on the Socialist Countries
>
> Historically, the concept of the nation-state has been anathema to the
> Vatican, whose tactics have been to rob sovereign nations of their
> nationhood and reduce to mere states or provinces of a single European
> nation-state controlled by her, even subdividing them internally where
> it suited her purposes.
>
> Her present goal is unchanged  to recreate a re-mediaevalised Europe of
> small, ineffectual states which she can easily dominate. Already, the
> map of Europe is becoming strikingly reminiscent of the period before
> World War I. The dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy after the War had
> enabled the creation of independent sovereign nation-states on its
> former territory, such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary. As
> Czechoslovakia recently split into its two constituent states, as
> Yugoslavia violently disintegrates into a jigsaw puzzle of its provinces
> and Hungary may still threaten to fall apart into ethnic regions, the
> familiar and unmistakable tactics of Rome have become increasingly
> discernible.
>
> History is repeating itself in a particularly obvious way in Yugoslavia
> and Czechoslovakia. In 1917 the Papal Nuncio in Munich, Pacelli,
> secretly negotiated with the Germans to accomplish the "Pope's Peace
> without Victory" in order to save both Germany and predominantly Papist
> Austria-Hungary from defeat and to strangle at birth two new
> nation-states  Yugoslavia, in which Roman Catholics would become a
> minority dominated by Orthodox Serbs, and Czechoslovakia, where they
> would be dominated by the Protestant Hussites and Liberals.
>
> After the plan failed, Nazi-supporter Pope Pius XII resumed the plot to
> achieve his lifelong dream of destroying the Serbian Orthodox Church as
> a rival religion by overtly aiming at Yugoslav disintegration  the one
> prerequisite for attaining his goal. His plan was to detach Roman
> Catholic Croatia from the rule of Orthodox Serbia and make it an
> independent religious state, and eventually to set up a Roman Catholic
> Kingdom in the Balkans.
>
> Ominously, the planned destruction of Yugoslavia has now actually been
> achieved. The Russian opposition leader Vladimir Zerenovski exposed the
> Rome's tactics by describing Croatia's secession from the
> legally-constituted State of Yugoslavia as "a Vatican plot". On the
> other hand, the Romanist propaganda machine that has infiltrated the
> European media falsely and consistently portrays Serbia, our former
> ally, as the aggressor. Croatian atrocities are conveniently ignored, as
> are those of Rome's Ustashi priests of the Nazi period.
>
> The Vatican's dream of detaching Roman Catholic Slovakia and thus
> re-dividing Czechoslovakia has now also materialised.
>
> Similar tactics are being employed in the case of Northern Ireland.
> Rome's clandestine aim is to detach the British Province from the United
> Kingdom and turn its Protestant majority into a minority, at the same
> time destroying the United Kingdom as a nation-state and
> ethnic-cleansing the Protestants from the Island of Ireland.
>
> Poland too has been thoroughly re-Romanised through the collusion of the
> Vatican with the Solidarnosc Movement, whose leader, Lec Walesa, an
> ardent Roman Catholic, subsequently became President. The significance
> of the election of a Polish Pope is almost too obvious to mention.
> Recent Polish history demonstrates that even countries where Roman
> Catholics are in the majority are jackbooted by Rome: the Vatican
> actively worked for centuries against Poland's independence from the
> Tsars, a fact which inspired the great national Polish poet Julius
> Slowacki's famous warning: "Poland, thy doom cometh from Rome!"
>
> The former Soviet Union has disintegrated into small states, some of
> which, including Ukraine, have large Roman Catholic populations; and the
> Vatican is now aiming at other targets  the Protestant Scandinavian
> countries in particular. Democratic Switzerland, the land of Zwingli and
> Calvin, has been left till the last. I has already been literally
> surrounded by regions where the Vatican holds sway.
>
> Are our leaders blind to what is going on in Europe, or are they naively
> stupid, or knowing collaborators?
>
> In his book Power Beyond the Market  Europe 1992  the title itself is
> significant  Otto von Habsburg lets the cat, or rather the Vatican
> beast, out of the bag. He arrogantly claims: "One of these days the
> Middle and East Europeans are going to belong to us. The call for
> self-determination from Lithuania [in the Soviet Union] to Croatia [in
> Yugoslavia] and beyond is heard today so that even the adversaries of a
> greater Europe can no longer ignore it."
>
> Significantly, these two regions, with Poland and Hungary, are strongly
> Roman Catholic. The deception, however, lies in the phrase
> "self-determination", a principle totally hostile to Romanism, as
> evidenced by its attempt to remove the same inalienable right from the
> British people of Northern Ireland. Croatia, Lithuania, Poland and
> Hungary are merely passing from the dictatorship of communism to the
> dictatorship of Romanism.
>
> The undermining of Britain and the USA
>
> The specific institutions which prevent the Vatican from securing
> domination and carrying out its "peace" plan in the free nations are
> two: the Church of England, which dominates the Constitution of the
> United Kingdom and is nominally Protestant  the Monarch being Defender
> of the Faith  and the United States Constitution, which similarly
> guarantees freedom of religion but by the opposite method of preventing
> a union of Church and State.
>
> It is a measure of Britain's blindness and folly that in 1988, when the
> 300th Anniversary of the "Glorious Revolution" was being commemorated,
> the Anglican Church had already had over twenty years of discussions
> with the Roman Catholic Church. When William of Orange landed at Brixham
> 5th November, 1688, a bloodless Revolution removed the last of the
> Stuart Kings and was the means of establishing the Protestant Throne and
> Constitution of this country through the Bill of Rights (1689) and the
> Act of Settlement (1701).
>
> If Britain were to become absorbed into a European Superstate, she would
> undo with a stroke of the pen what our forefathers won through the
> Reformation and enshrined in British constitutional law  the principle
> of Protestant ascendancy over Papal supremacy. For the modern European
> movement, disguised in economic garb, is in reality a new
> Counter-Reformation. When the Battle of the Reformation had closed at
> the Revolution of 1688 and Protestantism held the field, our forefathers
> wisely built ramparts around the rights and liberties that they had won.
> One such rampart was the Act of Settlement, which ensured that this
> country would have a Protestant Throne, a Protestant Legislature and a
> Protestant Electorate. The battle to liberate Britain from the
> ecclesiastical tyranny of Rome continued into 1690 and was not finally
> won until the Battle of the Boyne on 1st July, 1690. In Continental
> Europe it was not finally vanquished until the establishment of the
> Peace of Ryswick on 15th S
> eptember, 1697.
>
> If the three basic principles of the Revolution Settlement  a free
> Parliament, a free Press and a free Pulpit  should ever be dismantled,
> the constitutional implications for Britain would be disastrous. She
> would undo two thousand years of struggling to be free, and revert to a
> state of serfdom to the Church of Rome such as pertained in the Middle
> Ages.
>
> The attack on the British Constitution
>
> In 1973 the Brussels bureaucrats aided the Roman design by admitting to
> the European Common Market the Vatican's lackey the Irish Republic and
> the first two Protestant nations earmarked by the Pope  Denmark and the
> United Kingdom. We know very well why the UK took so long to make up its
> mind: joining the Continental Europeans meant a dramatic withdrawal from
> a global tradition; but did we recognise the underlying plot to destroy
> the Protestant heritage of our Nation, whose Queen is the Defender of
> the Faith? Romanism and Irish Republicanism, the traditional enemies of
> our British way of life which is founded on the principles of Protestant
> freedom gained by the Reformation, have once again in our history  this
> time in the guise of economic expediency  joined forces against us.
> Liam Cosgrave, Eire Premier at that time, specifically told his subjects
> that membership of Europe could be used as a means of accelerating a
> united Ireland. Since that time Republican terrorism and Ir
> ish nationalism, aided and abetted by the Roman hierarchy and
> facilitated by the ecumenical perfidiousness of the established
> Churches, have been progressively assailing Britain's Protestant faith
> and Constitution.
>
> On this occasion, however, the gravity of the situation has been
> increased by the perfidy and treachery of a Westminster which fell
> headlong for the ploy. Never in our Nation's history did a succession of
> British governments become so anti-British, so busily and blindly
> engaged in selling our birthright to foreigners, denying to the people
> of Great Britain and Northern Ireland their right to self-determination,
> content to sacrifice us against our will for some ill-conceived, naively
> misunderstood and politically fatal goal of European union.
>
> Nowhere is the Romanist attack on Britain so conspicuous and intense as
> in Northern Ireland, where the entrenched mediaeval Gaelic mind-set of a
> Rome-dominated minority comes into direct conflict with a way of life
> rooted in the ethos of the Protestant Reformation. In Ulster, under the
> familiar historical guise of pretended lack of 'parity of esteem', Rome
> and her Republican terrorist allies are single-mindedly dedicated to
> expunge, whether by lies or by murder, the civil and religious liberties
> rightfully enjoyed by the Protestant and Unionist majority.
>
> Rome is aided and abetted in this task by those so-called Protestant
> Churches which have treacherously jettisoned the principles of their
> Reformation-based articles of faith to associate with, condone and seek
> compromise with the beliefs and practices of the very Church whose Head
> they once regarded as the Man of Sin. Their collective action was
> profoundly symbolised at the Church of Ireland Synod in Dublin in May
> 1997 when Archbishop Robin Eames, under the watchful eye of a portrait
> of King William of Orange to which he had turned his back, vented his
> spite against the imaginary 'sectarianism' of Protestant Fundamentalism
> and the Orange Order  his two pet hatreds  and advocated the
> separation of the Church of Ireland from the very principles on which it
> was founded. Significantly, Dr Eames has never uttered a word of
> condemnation against the blatant sectarianism, false doctrine and
> historical massacres perpetrated by the Church of Rome because, with his
> ecumenical allies, he
>  is actively working for unity with that very Church.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "charles scott" <charlesrscott@...>
> To: <faithandlife@...>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 11:34 AM
> Subject: [FaithandLife] European Union must not neglect its spiritual
> roots
>
>
>>
>> European Union Must Not Be Limited to Economic Factors Alone
>>
>> Congress Emphasizes Value of Europe's Cultural, Spiritual and Artistic
> Roots
>>
>> ROME, MAY 19, 2003 (Zenit.org).
>> - A recent congress, organized to study
>> relations between Catholicism and European literature, warns that the
> construction of
>> the European Union must not neglect its spiritual, cultural and
>> artistic
> roots.
>>
>> The congress entitled "Catholicism and 20th Century Literature. A
>> Bridge Between East and West," cautions against a construction of the
>> European
> Union limited
>> to economic criteria alone, since the literature of the Eastern
>> countries
> has
>> proven itself as a factor of unity toward the continent and the world.
>>
>> "In 2004, seven European countries will become part of the European
>> Union, countries that belong to what Olivier Clement called the 'Third
>> Europe,'
> between
>> Russia and the Western countries," Andrea Monda, the organizer and
> moderator of
>> the meeting, explained to ZENIT agency.
>>
>> "It seemed opportune for us to pay attention to these countries
>> because,
> as the
>> Holy Father often stresses, the construction of the European Union
>> cannot
> be
>> done strictly on the economic factor," Andrea said. "In fact, the
> spiritual,
>> cultural, and artistic roots of Europe must be re-established."
>>
>> Andrea Monda emphasized that "art, religiosity, and culture are
>> dimensions
> that
>> go hand in hand. To forget that Europe was already united in the
>> Middle
> Ages by
>> the same Christian faith means to risk not creating a real union, but
>> only
> to
>> partially resolve market problems. These are partial resolutions that
>> do
> not
>> unify Europe."
>>
>> "For these reasons, we have opted to look at the literature of this
>> third Europe, including great Russia. This part of Europe has given us
>> very
> great authors,
>> even in the 20th century, such a tragic century. The different
>> speakers
> have
>> tried to show how in these situations of division and opposition, the
> artists
>> maintained contact with Europe and the world," he added.
>>
>> During the congress, held in the "Palazzo Mattei di Paganica,"
> headquarters of
>> the Italian Encyclopedia, we learned, for example, the history of
>> Tudor Arghezi, "a great Rumanian poet and writer who lived the
>> religious
> dimension
>> profoundly, at a time when his country was under the Communist
> dictatorship," Monda
>> added.
>>
>> "The Marxist regimes attempted to suffocate not only spirituality but
>> also
> the
>> artistic spirit. Tudor Arghezi is an example that art has no limits or
>> barriers; it is a privileged channel to give back a common identity to
>> a
> Europe that
>> seems deprived of it," Monda explained.
>>
>> John Paul II is very relevant to this debate because with him "the
> centrality
>> of Poland emerges," Monda stressed.
>>
>> "The figure of the Holy Father assumes even more the Pontiff's
>> authority
> in the
>> sense that he builds a bridge. Wojtyla is a Polish poet and
>> philosopher,
> but
>> his human and spiritual circumstance assumes a universal dimension, a
> unifying
>> figure who tries to remind politicians about the importance of the
> Christian
>> spiritual roots," he said.
>>
>> "The present tendency in Europe is to disregard God, without realizing
> that by
>> so doing, man is also disregarded," Andrea Monda warned.
>>
>
>
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