The Return of Christendom by Dr. Steve Turley

Author:Dr. Steve Turley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turley Talks
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART III:

THE NEW CHRISTIAN MAJORTY

CHAPTER 5

Poland and the National Christian Renewal

In June of 1979, the recently elected pope, John Paul II, passed through the Iron Curtain, back to his homeland of Poland. Over the course of nine days, the world witnessed a profound display of distinctly Christian hope, as John Paul II prayed in the presence of hundreds of thousands of Poles: “Let your Holy Spirit descend and renew the face of this earth and this land.” Such prayers ignited the moral imaginations of a people bound under the yoke of communism and atheistic materialism, sparking a mass movement of liberation that swept over Eastern Europe in the course of a decade. It was called the ‘summer of hope.’

I couldn’t help but think of that summer when I read about a ceremony at the Church of Divine Mercy in Krakow on November 19th, 2016, where the Catholic Bishops of Poland, in the presence of President Andrzej Duda and many Catholic pilgrims, officially recognized Jesus Christ as the King of Poland and called upon Him to rule over their nation, its people and their political leaders. It was as if those prayers of John Paul II were being fulfilled on that day; we were witnessing nothing short of the Holy Spirit descending upon Poland awakening a model Christian civilization.

Church attendance, too, has been on the rise of late. According to figures from the Institute of Statistics of the Catholic Church in Poland, the percentage of people regularly attending church in Poland rose in 2015 from 39.1 percent to about 40 percent, which is a significant departure from the trend marking the decline in church attendance in many parts of Western Europe. According to the religion website Zenit.org, there was what they called a “massive” surge in church participation across the country: there were 369,000 baptisms, 360,000 confirmations, 270,000 first communions, and 134,000 marriages.[44] All of this was taking place on top of a study in 2014 that found that there were more than 60,000 parish organizations involving 2.5 million people active in Poland, along with nearly 2,000 Catholic social institutions such as schools or hospices. Furthermore, the number of Catholic priests in Poland also rose to a record 20,800, which as Breitbart news observes, suggests that Poland is rejecting the secular liberalism of institutions such as the European Union (EU) and embracing its traditional Christian culture.[45]

And Christianity is beginning to infuse every aspect of Polish political life. Recently, the Polish parliament proposed legislation that would have banned abortion from the nation. Poland already has one of the most restrictive laws in Europe, allowing for abortion in only three cases: rape, the risk of the life of the mother, and serious malformations in the fetus. While the proposed bill didn’t pass, the Polish government continues to push for a new law that would be a near total ban. And in the face of tremendous pressure from eurocrats in the European Union and NGOs to accept so-called ‘same-sex marriage,’ Poland has stood unmovable.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.