Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos I, a spiritual leader who represents Eastern Orthodox Christianity, has urged young Christians to resist secularisation in Europe in a message to an ecumenical meeting that was greeted by global and regional leaders.
“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe no longer recognises the place for Christianity that history dedicated to it – it is as if Christianity were being expelled from the history of Europe,” said Bartholomeos I, the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
The Patriarch made his appeal in a message sent to a five-day European Youth Meeting, organised by France’s ecumenical Taizé Community in Poznan, Poland.
“We wish to recall here that the identity of Europe is primarily Christian and cannot be considered without this legacy,” he said in his message to the 29 December-2 January gathering. “The secularisation of Europe here takes the form of a rejection of the God of history. Nonetheless, the mobilisation of Christians throughout Europe is an important initiative recalling the Christian roots of this continent, its identity and its values.”
Me4anwhile, the PB of the Episcopal Church, worships the idol of “Freedom” in her church’s support of unrestricted access to abortion. And the Archbishop of Canterbury claims to be in “communion” with her.
Imagine, 30,000 young people gathered for a huge Christian assembly in Poland. Fantastic. Although it’s really nothing new; as the article notes, the ecumencial Taize monks have been organizing such huge youth gatherings every year for three decades. So it’s perhaps premature to write off Europe entirely as a post-Christian continent. There are still millions of Christians scattered among the many more millions of secularized ex-Christians or non-Christians.
But Europe has clearly moved into a new and dangerous period that can properly be called “post-Christendom,” i.e., after the break up of the old union of Church and State, or Christianity and the general culture. The Constantinian era is plainly over.
And I for one celebrate that new reality, with all its exciting new possibilities for a more genuine, more biblical, counter-cultural Christianity similar to the pre-Constantinian Church though inevitably quite different too.
Making special efforts to reach young people, bring them to faith in Christ, and mobilize them for ministry is an essential task, for which the Taize Community is to be commended. Statistics regularly show that something like 80% of those who ever experience conversion and become Christians do so before they reach the age of 20.
David Handy+