By Ted Belman
Make no mistake about it, Christianity is withering away in Europe. For over one thousand years, Christianity persecuted the Jews of Europe and aimed to replace Judaism with Christianity or supercede it.
My, how things have changed.
Giulio Meotti writes about how Islam is superseding Christianity in in secular Europe.
- – but in recent times the number of Catholics in the area has shrunk to such an extent that those attending Mass at St. Peter’s were simply no longer able to maintain a priest and the church buildings”.
Islam is replacing Christianity as first religion everywhere in Europe.
In France, dozens of churches have been razed to make way for mosques, showrooms and malls.
The Observatory for Religious Heritage claims that “for the first time places of worship are destroyed for no apparent reason and turned into parking lots, restaurants, boutiques, gardens and homes”. According to the French Senate, 2,800 Christian religious buildings are now at risk of being demolished.
France now has just 9.000 priests measured against 40,000 during the last war. Many churches are replaced by mosques.
The National Federation of the Great Mosque of Paris, the Council of Democratic Muslims of France and the Collectif Banlieues asked the Catholic Church, in a spirit of “inter-religious solidarity”, to rent the empty churches to the Muslims for their Friday prayers.
Robert Schuman once called it “the Europe of Cathedrals”. But today German cathedrals are put on sale on eBay, looking for potential buyers. The church of St. Bernard in Brandenburg is the twenty-fifth to be put on the market by the Diocese of Berlin in the last ten years. Starting price: 120.000 euros.
Despite the fact that “Papa Emeritus” Joseph Ratzinger comes from Germany and the current German President Joachim Gauck is a Protestant pastor, Germany is literally selling its churches. Some people evoke the “Gott ist tot” (God is dead) of Friedrich Nietzsche.
According to a report in the weekly magazine Spirit, in the next two years 15,000 of the 45,000 existing churches in Germany, a third of the total, will be demolished or sold.
But this is not an economic problem. The churches are closing down because they are empty. It is the phenomenon of the “Konfessionslos”, the Germans without religion. It is estimated that every 75 seconds a German leaves the church.
The church of the Holy Family in Barmstedt has been demolished. Between 1990 and 2010, the German Evangelical Church closed 340 churches. Recently in Hamburg, a Lutheran church was purchased by the Muslim community.
The German weekly Der Spiegel called it “the Last Supper”. In Spandau, the church of St. Raphael is now a grocery store, while in Karl Marx’s town the churches are turned into gyms. In Cologne, a church has been transformed into a luxurious residence with a private pool.
Take Frankfurt am Main. In the 50’s, when Konrad Adenauer was the chancellor, 430,000 Protestants lived in the city. Today there are 110,000. A quarter of the churches in the city have been closed.
The famous leaning tower that vies with Pisa, the campanile located in the German town of Bad Frankenhausen, no longer calls for the faithful. Meanwhile in Petriplatz, in the central Mitte district of Berlin, there is the project of a multicultural building unique in Europe: a mosque, a church and a synagogue all under the same roof. The building will be symbolically built on the ruins of the old church of St. Peter. They call it a “religious amalgam”.
In the Netherlands, two Christian buildings close every week. The Netherlands has, in fact, become the world’s most important exporter of religious objects. Here for the first time secularization has become a business.
“In the Netherlands, the Catholic presence on Sunday was the highest in Europe, ninety per cent”, said Rev. Jan Stuyt of Nijmegen. “Now it is ten percent”. Every year sixty places of worship shut down, are sold or demolished. Between 1970 and 2008, 205 Catholic churches were demolished in the Netherlands and 148 converted into libraries, restaurants, gyms, apartments and mosques.
The Dutch Ministry of Culture has even drawn up guidelines on dealing with the conversion of disused or abandoned churches.
The church of St. Jacobus, one of the oldest of the city of Utrecht, a cradle of Catholicism, has just been transformed into a luxury residence by a group specializing in the conversion of churches.
The Protestant church loses 60,000 participants each year. At this rate, it will cease to exist by 2050, according to church officials.
In the ultra liberal and tolerant Netherlands, these are known as “the dead churches”.
These are the symbols of the existential condition of the West: the vacuum in the “the evening land” will be filled by the religion coming from the East, “the morning land”.
Just as Christianity dominated Europe’s values and politics for centuries, the ascendancy of Islam in Europe will result in Muslems dominating Europe’s values and politics. Secularism is no match for religion.
In America, all liberal churches and synagogues are in decline. Only the Christian evangelicals and orthodox Jews thrive.
In Israel, orthodoxy is taking over the country if only because the orthodox are having more children. But their commitment is as strong as ever. Fortunately the seculars are not a total write off. They have a very strong love of country that will sustain them. Also an interest in their cultural roots:
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Secondly and more positively, as much as there is a decrease in desire for secular Jews in America to identify with their religious roots, the opposite seems to be true in Israel.
There are study groups and seminars dispersed throughout the country consisting of secular Israelis who are interested in identifying with their roots by discussing the texts of the Torah.
Many of these forums are referred to as cultural encounters and they distance themselves from being associated with anything which could be called religious, but they represent a resurgence of learning and a renaissance in connecting with one’s Jewish roots.
In fact I read that, this Israeliness is attracting more and more secular Jews in America:
- In major metro areas across the United States such as Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Boston, Israeli-American organizations are popping up and growing in popularity. Programs for families, young adults and children alike, centered on Israeli culture and Jewish identity have swelling appeal.
Participation in these Israeli-American organizations is increasing rapidly, and not only among Israeli expats and their children. In greater numbers, American Jews join in on Israeli programs related to Hebrew language, Jewish education, and creating connectedness to Israel through the arts, music, literature, and tradition.
@ ArnoldHarris:
Your logic appears to be good, your facts don’t.
There is a very large number of Muslims in Russia. Fortunately most of them are totally secular. They are just “Muslims” by birth. The real threat that these nominal “Muslims” could become real Muslims.
This is largely what happened in Chechnya, tragically so!
Initial Chechen struggle was for autonomy, a partial independence from Russia, where they’d be allowed to run their internal affair, while remaining under Russian rule for all other purposes. Unfortunately Yeltsin did not agree, killed the secular Chechen leader, and effectively started a transformation of the nationalist fight into a religious one. Russian assaults on Chechnya were of the most atrocious kind. The capitol city, Grozny, was bombed indiscriminately, 200,000 people estimated to have been killed. Of course overwhelming majority of the killed had nothing to do with politics, and were totally secular. War crimes of such magnitude call for revenge. I’d want to avenge the death of my family, too. The Arab and other Al Qaeda fighters were the most forthcoming with help. This transformed the resistance against Russian barbarity into a religious war, with musloid barbarity.
@ retired:
The native mobs may not have a chance to defeat the musloid mobs.
A generation from now, there will be more young musloids that young native French.
And only the young men count in riots, revolutions and other violent events.
Most kids born today in France are musloid.
Similar situation in England, Belgium and Holland.
The Roman Catholic Church is a dying entity, in Europe and probably in the Americas as well. Most Christians whom I know in this country regard the Vatican and its Pope as a sort of quaint Italian version of the Royal House of Windsor, with about the same level of significance. But the Evangelical Protestant movements and the Mormon Church of the Latter-Day Saints are both feeding off the carcasses of Roman Catholicism.
However, I think you will all find that in the Orthodox Christian lands of Southeastern Europe and all across Great Russia, the death of Communism has been instrumental in the vast and rapid rebirth of the national Orthodox churches of each of those separate cultures. Islam will never find a foothold among the Slavs other than in Bosna, where a large percentage of the Bogomils of the 15th century mass converted to the Islam of the Ottoman Empire that had conquered and occupied that country after the Serbs were defeated in the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389.
Russia’s main urban problems in recent years has been caused by the Muslim Chechins. I think the day will come when the tough new government of the Russian Empire will gather them up and ship them to a 21st century Gulag Archipelago in the frozen wastelands of Siberia and the Russian Arctic. There are times in which cruelty against a minority saves the lives or at least the well-being of the country’s majority. In any case, most Russians care no more about democracy than I do. Especially so in regard to guarantees of the civil liberties of our national enemies.
Chances are that the Russians have little more use for Jews now than they ever have had before. But I don’t care about that, so long as they treat Islam as enemy action and take determined steps to stamp out its practices all across the largest country in the world. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, irrespective of the fact that they don’t like me much better than they do their enemy. In any case, most of the Jews from that part of the world have migrated out, not only to Israel but also to Germany and the Americas.
I basically am uninterested in popularity contests among the goyim. All I want to see is them to engage in a death struggle against the most prominent enemies of the Jewish nation.
If there is something faulty about my logic in this analysis, I will be pleased to read countering arguments. But basically, all I care about are the geopolitics of the growth of the comparative power base of the Jewish nation.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Pundits across the blogosphere keep jumping back to the same tired old meme that Islam will take over Europe.It may be a great copy-cat subject for professional pundits to knock out a quick article to sell somewhere.In reality it is an absurd idea,it will never happen!
Islam consists of failed societies which cannot even run traditional Islamic nations.All across the Islamic world all you will find is murder & bloodshed.Islam has no institutions capable of governing modern,heavily populated,nations.Just try Envisioning Europe being ruled by a conquering Sicilian Mafia,the idea is crazy.The Mafia has no infrastructure capable of governing a modern state;crime & violence are their only business!
The same applies to Islam,they can destroy things but they can’t build or administer European Nation-States.
What will probably happen is the fall of the E.U.Welfare State. Europe’s economy is in terrible shape.When it fails in the near future the Socialists will be unable to buy off the hungry mobs with entitlements.When This happens the locals will hit the streets enmasse. It will be payback time for the hated Moslems!
Eventually,when the dust has settled,it will be time to “Make the trains run on time”with a new crop of Mussolini’s & Franco’s(And no more Moslems).The future for Europe is Fascist dictatorship,not Islam!
Well, it depends on the brand of secularism.
The Soviet secularism kicked religion’s ass.
Mosques, Churches and Synagogues were closed all over the country and converted into something useful like pig sties 🙂
I think that Western secularism needs more balls especially when dealing with Islam.
We need to conquer humanists, atheists, agnostics, “progressives”, and general leftist into the HATE-ISLAM camp.
Islam is the total anathema of everything leftists stand for.
The only way Israel will survive is when its present generation of depraved, corrupt and cowardly leaders dies out.
When the Jews are faithful to G-d, there will be a marked decrease in anti-Semitism and Israel will become a light unto the nations.
It is like many communist head quarters are now replaced with Nazi quarters.
Europe’s true religion has always been, and still is, Jew-hatred and Jew-killing. And since Islam promises to finish the work of Europe’s true hero – Hitler – this is why Europeans are either embracing Islam or at least not resisting it.
That being said, remember, that leftism/Marxism is also a religion, and that is the faith that has replaced Christianity both in Europe and in blue state America – at least until, in Europe’s case, Islam take over demographically.