Commentary: Freedom of Faith:

 

 

Why is Christianity Under Such Fierce Attack?

The Case for Spain and the United States

 

by Dr. Julio A. Gonzalo

Professor, Condensed Matter Physics, UAM, Madrid, Spain

President, Asociación Española Ciencia y Cultura

1. Introduction

In the Guest Column of New Oxford Review (July-August 2018) Amir Azarvan, Professor of Political Science at Georgia Gwinnett College, Georgia, gives in a Figure the Increase of Suicide Rate (2005-2015) – Y vs the Increase in Theism (4th - 6th Waves in the World Values Survey) – X indicating that the United States (Y = 2.5, X = -6.3) and Spain (Y = 0,5, X = -7.4) are further from the center (Y = 0, X = 0) than most countries. In other words, they show the largest increases in suicide rates and the largest decreases in theism rates. The author concludes that “Atheism has a suicide problem” and points out that this agrees with what was concluded before in the Huffington Post,  Dec. 8, 2017.

 

Of course, Christianity must not be judged on the grounds of its ‘popularity’ or its ‘statistical relevance’.  Christ said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life”.

 

According to the New Testament, Christ sent the Apostles, in particular Peter and Paul, to announce the Good News to all men, till the confines of the earth and till the end of times: God is the Creator of everything, visible and invisible, and He is Our Father. We must pray to Him saying “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…”.

 

To deny, as often done in Europe and America today, the truth of supernatural realities, including prophecies and miracles, is equivalent to accept as good a pantheistic cosmic worldview in which neither man nor God are free. It is equivalent to accept a purely deterministic, or a purely chaotic cosmos. Such a world would be meaningless.

 

Some time ago, in a television program shown in Madrid, Intereconomía, one of the participants declared himself to be a materialist. Another participant, Fr. Manuel Carreira, SJ., a friend of mine, physicist and philosopher, said that if everything reduces to pure matter and pure material activity as determined by one of the well known four interactions (electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravitational) one could ask which combination of these four interactions explains for instance the actual writing of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the Cervantes masterpiece. Of course, that question posed by Fr. Carreira did not receive any meaningful answer from his materialist opponent.

 

A supremely intelligent and all powerful Creator, capable of creating intelligent and free creatures (of course, with limited intelligence and limited freedom, compared with the Creator’s infinite intelligence and freedom), could inform any time his creatures about his creative activity if He so willed.

 

Of the three monotheist religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, only Christianity affirms as a fact the reality of Incarnation: God made Man. Christianity affirms Christ’s death at the Cross. And Christ’s resurrection. And we know, the Gospel ends up with a void tomb, and with a Resurrection. And with a Beginning: the Beginning of the Christian Catholic, Apostolic Church.

 

Three centuries after that beginning the successors of the Apostles had already permeated the entire Roman Empire, Egypt and part of the Middle East. Under the sign of the Cross, they proclaimed immediately, the Nicean/Cosmopolitan Creed, a creed that gave to the world a doctrine, a discipline and a set of sacraments. As noted by Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, “if Christ did not rise after death, vain is our faith”.  Christ promised Peter the “keys to the Kingdom”.  And, as G.K. Chesterton said almost two thousand years later: “the Creed is like a key… (and) a key is, prior to anything, something with a shape; something which depends absolutely of keeping its own shape (The Everlasting Man, New York, 1955).

 

Europe and America have been increasingly de-Christianized during the last third of the 20th century, and we Christians know very little of course about how the hereafter will be. So it was too for the Sadducees contemporary of Christ, who asked Him speciously about the hypothetic case of a woman who married seven brothers one after the other: Which one would be husband in the afterlife? Christ answered: “You are wrong, because you don’t know the Scriptures  nor God’s power. After their resurrection neither men nor women will marry, they will be in Heaven like angles of God” (Mt. 22, 22–23).

 

Contemporary Cosmology tells us that space-time has been growing since 13.7×109 ago. And that our Solar System, and the Earth within it may last for 5×109 years – a long time but perhaps substantially less.

 

Only God is infinite, eternal. Everything in the material cosmos is finite. Saint Augustine, who knew the Earth was spherical, not flat, said at the end of the Western Roman Empire that Christianity either propagated by way of miracles or without them. But, if did so without miracles, that would have been the greatest miracle. Today there are 2.5-billion Christians in the world according to the Encyclopedia Britannica (Book of the Year 2017). By the end of the 21st century this number might fall to one half, or one half of the one half, or even less… but Christ’s promise is clear: “I will be with you until the end of the centuries” (Mt. 28, 20).

2. Throughout the 20th Century Christianity was under heavy attack by Soviet Communism.

It is well known that November 1989 marked the Fall of the Berlin Wall which had divided the Soviet Empire from the Free West. Two years later, in November 1991, the USSR – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – which for three generations had proclaimed Marxism-Leninism (i.e. Atheism) its raison d’être, formally dissolved. That day President Gorbachev received four high ranking dignitaries at his dacha in the Crimea. His telephone went dead. Only a few minutes thereafter he was given, to be signed, a document declaring a state of emergency, and transferring all power to General Igor Matsev, the Commander in Chief of the Air Force Special Troops. He and his family were put under house arrest at that moment. Thereafter Gorbachev had no choice but to listen the Voice of America or the BBC to know that was happening outside. In a few days, after an unsuccessful military coup, the Communist Empire, the first Atheist Empire in history, broke down. And thereafter Boris Yeltsin became the first President of Russia after Soviet Communism.

 

At that time developments which were totally unexpected just months before began to take place. Communism had appeared suddenly and violently in 1917 and it had taken great steps Westward just after the Second World War under Stalin. Communistic Atheism had also taken an even larger step Eastward with the conquest of China in 1949. When International Communism celebrated its 50th Anniversary more than one-third of mankind was under its rule: half of Europe, more than half of Asia, almost half of Africa, and one important enclave in America: Castro’s Cuba.

 

“Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruits”, as Ignacio Silone, an Italian convert from Soviet Communist, had said. The Livre Noir de Communisme (Courtrois, Werth, Paczkowski, Bartosed, Margolin: Paris, 1997) documents very well the 100-million mortal victims of Soviet Communism throughout the 20th century. In Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, in Kim Il Sung’s Korea, in Castro’s Cuba, in Mengistu’s Ethiopia, in Neto’s Angola, and so forth… From Stalin’s massive killing of more than 25-million kulaks accompanied by the destruction of thousands of Russia’s Orthodox churches; to the assassination of thirteen bishops and more than six thousand priests, and nuns in Spain, along with the destruction of thousands of Catholic churches during Spanish Civil war of 1936-39 (when many religious tombs were profaned by the masses); to the killing of 65-million in China by Mao’s Red Guard; to the 1.7 million (half the total population) killed in Cambodia.

 

Wherever the Atheistic Soviet rule of Communism was set it quickly led to large-scale crime, terror and depression.

 

Several factors triggered the fall of the Communist Empire besides its intrinsic economic inefficiency. The original revolutionary ‘mystique’ which had lead many men and women to sacrifice themselves for the ‘cause’ in the first decades after 1917, began to fade away when the geostrategic advances of Communism were the greatest.

 

Freedom fighters in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, as well as internal dissidents inside Russia began finally to achieve worldwide notoriety. Moreover, the conflict in Afghanistan and tremendous disasters, like those which happened at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, became too obvious to be swept under the carpet.

 

The coincidence in time of two great personalities as world leaders: Carol Wojtila (Pope John Paul II in 1978) and Ronald Reagan (US President 1981-89) was essential to trigger the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire. It should not be forgotten that precisely in 1981, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB leader, became the man in charge of the USSR. Therefore, he was at the helm the year (1981) during which the attempted assassinations of Reagan in Washington, on May 13, 1981 and John Paul II in Rome on May 13, 1981, took place.

 

If those two notorious assassination attempts had not failed, no one knows whether the Communist Empire would be still alive today, as none other than Henry Kissinger ‘prophesized’ just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

3. “But why then is Theism now also under fire, still after the fall of Communism?”

That is certainly a good question. Material well-being is, in principle, good in itself and has been on the rise for many decades the world over, especially in North America and in Europe. But the spiritual dimension of men and women is fundamental and it cannot be ignored as the source of social and moral order.

 

The early scientific discoveries of Max Planck (Quantum Theory) and Albert Einstein (Relativity Special and General) resulted in the formulation of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920’s and 1940’s was ideal to describe molecules, atoms, nuclei and elementary particles was well fitted to investigate astrophysics and cosmology throughout the 20th century. As a result, solid state, lasers, artificial satellites, space travel (ending with man landing on the Moon) and advanced microelectronics, (resulting finally in the development of digital computers and supercomputers) gave rise to the technological revolution which has provided great benefit to the Christian West (as well as Japan), and more slowly to the Third World (the most populated countries in Asia, Africa and South America, and less so the Communist East), which begun to fall behind in comparison with the rapid technological developments in Western Europe and the US. These immense improvements in the West were, however, accompanied by a tremendous moral and cultural decomposition evidenced in the growth of crime, terrorism, pornography, sex abuse…labeled ‘progress’ by the omni-present Mass Media…

 

Simultaneously, and unexpectedly, a wave of Agnosticism and Anti-Christian Atheism begun to become increasingly visible: on television, in the Mass Media, in films, books et al… ‘Best Sellers’ factually assuming “Materialism” and “Atheism” as the obvious “most rational” options began to be shown prominently at bookstores and elsewhere. The ‘arguments’ put forth by the authors were, for the most part, contradictory and inconsistent. Take, for example, the case of Human Rights, as assumed in the US Declaration of Independence (That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”). The early origin of these human rights lay in the ancient Greece of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the Rome of Cicero and Seneca and Saint Augustine, but, in particular, in Medieval Christendom, which gave rise to the Crusades (which took place to defend Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem); to the great and beautiful gothic cathedrals; the great medieval universities to the great Summa’s (as that of St. Thomas Aquinas) the best literature, the best music, the best painting, and the best early science coming from the minds of such luminaries as Buridan, to Copernicus to Galileo, Kepler and finally to Newton. The best Synthesis of Faith and Reason and the best Legal Tradition (based upon Roman Law)….

 

One hundred and fifty years ago the men of European descent populating Europe, Russia, North, Central and South America together made up 25% of the world’s population. Today, their descendants comprise no more than 8%. In England, France, Italy and Spain there is a decreasing native population, while Islamic and Sub-Saharan, immigration is slowly invading those European countries.

 

The concept of human rights, based upon the recognition of God as Omnipotent Common Father and Creator of everything, (visible and invisible) is the only possible foundation of inalienable rights and human brotherhood. If there is no God, no Creator, everything is chaos. There is no Law and no order, except the law of the jungle.

 

Table I: A – B – C below gives the quantitative evolution of Christians, Muslims, Agnostics and Atheists 2004-2018 in the World, USA and Spain.

 

Table I Evolution of Christians / Muslims / Agnostic / Atheists in the World, the USA and Spain 2004 – 2013 – 2018 according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

A. The World

 

Christians

2004

1.66×109

 

2013

1.98×109

 

2018

2.07×109

Muslims

2004

1.25×109

 

2013

1.60×109

 

2018

1.75×109

Agnostics

2004

0.78×109

 

2013

0.67×109

 

2018

0.69×109

Atheists

2004

0.14×109

 

2013

0.13×109

 

2018

0.13×109

 

Population

2004

6.28×109

 

2013

7.05×109

 

2018

7.43×109

 

B. The United States

 

Christians

2004

134.08×106

 

2013

133.03×106

 

2018

136.35×106

Muslims

2004

4.64×106

 

2013

4.10×106

 

2018

4.38×106

Agnostics

2004

2.87×106

 

2013

 

2018

48.50×106

Atheists

2004

1.38×106

 

2013

1.31×106

 

2018

2.81×106

 

 

C. Spain

 

Christians

2004

37.06×106

 

2013

36.92×106

 

2018

37.37×106

Muslims

2004

0.20×106

 

2013

0.20×106

 

2018

1.15×106

Agnostics

2004

2.97×106

Atheists

2013

 

2018

3.01×106

 

 

Let us comment briefly on why the US and Spain are under special attack today by ‘multiculturalists’, ‘atheists’, ‘Islamic terrorists’, separatists, terrorists and the like…

 

The United States, under Reagan, triggered the downfall of the Berlin Wall and the final defeat of Soviet Communism. Franco’s Spain, on the other hand, won the first 20th century military victory over Soviet Communism by way of the Spanish Civil War. Both nations played prominent roles in the Cold War: Western Christian Civilization against Atheistic International Communism.

 

A few months ago I had a long conversation with Stanley G. Payne, the well known American historian and specialist on Hispanic affairs after the Civil War. We met with a mutual friend (a recently retired General of the Spanish Army) who had known Payne for many years. At the coffee table we were in agreement that the present (as of 2018) political situation is not very dangerous in either the US or in Spain. But Spain, in particular, is under fire from ‘Podemos’, Separatists in the Basque Provinces, and Separatists in the Catalonian Provinces. Payne told us that Obama’s years (2009- January 2017) had been as deleterious for the US as Rodriguez Zapatero's years (2004-2011) had been for Spain.

 

Christianity in the United States is still strong today, and even under attack its faithful account for more than 136 million pro-life Evangelical Protestants and Catholics (many of Hispanic origin). The Organization of American States (OAS), under American leadership, counts on conservative and centrist governments in many important South American countries. In principle, the US can well take care of extreme-left pro-communist governments, as those existing in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. It would be of course much better if the US could count on Spain for a conservative, anti-communist government rather that the present left wing pro-communist government of Pedro Sanchez, which is friendly to Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

 

In any case, America is the most Christian, most Catholic Continent in the World. And it is the less Atheist, Agnostic, and the least inflicted of Islamic terrorism of all Western nations.

 

Let us take a look at Spain: Spain (the Iberian Peninsula) was historically an important Roman province after the wars between Romans and Carthaginians. It was under the rule of the Visigoths from 411 to 711 a.d. that Muslim troops conquered almost all the Iberian Peninsula except a small region in the mountains of Covadonga, Asturias. Thereafter a long war of Reconquest ensued which ended almost eight centuries later with the recovery of Granada by the Catholic Kings, Isabel of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon, in 1492. Since then Spain has been a bulwark of Christian Catholic Christendom, the only land to be recovered from Islamic dominion in many centuries. In 1492 Castilian ships discovered America and Portuguese navigators circumvented Cape of Good Hope, establishing passage to India, China and Japan.

 

Almost one half of the present US territory – from California, Nevada and Arizona to New Mexico, Texas South Carolina and Florida – belonged for centuries to the Spanish Crown. The Spanish General Bernardo Gálvez, with troops from New Spain (México) helped George Washington to defeat the British troops during the Revolutionary War. Some cities in the US South display today historic Spanish emblems and symbols in their public plazas. In Mobile, Alabama the Yoke (Yugo) and the Arrows (Flechas) symbolizing Isabel and Ferdinand, the Spanish Catholic Kings, are shown in the Spanish Plaza with statues of the Kings.

 

In the Philippines more than one hundred million Christian Catholics today comprise the largest Christian country in Asia, thanks to Spain’s long lasting missionary efforts, and thanks also it might be added to Catholic American missionaries coming to the archipelago just after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

 

In Spain, Theism and Christianity are under attack today by left wing socialists, pro-communists, terrorists and anti-Christian separatists. The new socialist government under Pedro Sánchez is following closely Rodriguez Zapatero’s extreme left policies driven by hatred of Franco’s heritage and hatred also no doubt for the great Cross of Cuelgamuros, near El Escorial, fifty kilometers away from Madrid. At that site more than thirty thousand soldiers, casualties of the Civil War on both sides, rest beneath the great underground Basilica consecrated as a symbol of reconciliation in 1962 by Pope John XXIII, the Pope of Peace. Sanchez wants to ignore this holy Papal symbol.

 

If the Nationalist Rising of July 18, 1936, in which falangists, traditionalists, Christian democrats and monarchists, plus the Army of Africa, under Franco, had been defeated by the pro-Soviet Popular Front of Largo Caballero, Prieto and Negrin, comprised of Marxist-Leninists, anarchists, communists, Trotskyites, separatists, etc,… instead of the ten to twelve thousand men shot (or otherwise summarily executed) a winning pro-Soviet Popular Front government would have been responsible for  more than two million deaths. [See The Black Book on Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999)].

 

Throughout the 20th century the number of murder victims of International Communism in countries where Communism won civil wars totals more than one-hundred-million souls (as detailed in the Black Book) lost in Russia, Eastern Europe, China, South East Asia… with a total population of about one-billion. In other words, about ten per cent of the total populations of these nations died due to Atheistic Bolshevism. This translates to more than two million for Spain, with a total population of about twenty six million at the time of the war.

 

The Spanish extreme left of Sánchez and Rodríguez Zapatero would like us to believe the so-called ‘Law of Historic Memory’, which would be more accurately be cited as the ‘Law of Loss of Historic Memory’.

 

After the Second World War Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Adenauer, McMillan, de Gaulle, et al all had friendly relationships with Franco as the Spanish Chief of State who played a strategic role in the Cold War against Soviet Communism. It is unfortunately he did not live a few years more to see communism fall in Russia under Gorbachev.

 

The New York Times (whose leftist sympathies are sufficiently known) reported Franco’s death prominently and respectfully, and reproduced his Testament in full (Even Fidel Castro decreed ten days of official mourning in Communist Cuba upon Franco’s death).

 

Finally, I think special consideration is merited for the words of Julian Besteiro (1870-1940), a very honest and prominent socialist leader in 1939, who said then, when Franco’s soldiers were ready to enter Madrid, these eloquent words:

 

“The real truth: We are defeated because our own guilt (of course, to make my own that guilt is pure rhetoric). We are defeated nationally because we have allowed ourselves to be dragged to the bolshevist line which is, perhaps, the greatest political aberration known by the centuries. The international policy of Russia at the hands of Stalin… has become a monstrous crime which surpasses by far the macabre conceptions of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy…”

 

Christianity and Theism are today under attack in the US and Spain. This is a fact. And the facts, in particular, the facts of history, must be kept in focus against all odds. When we are on the side of facts, we are on the side of Christ.

 

The Author may be contacted directly via: Julio.gonzalogonzalez@gmail.com

 

 

 

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