“B-16” IS NEW POPE AFTER JP-2 PASSES; WILL AFRICAN OR LATIN POPE BE NEXT UP SUCCESSOR?
by Kevin J. Walker
“...And may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. “ -- Wm. Shakespeare, “Henry V”
The new Pope, 265th over 2,000 years has a hard act to follow in John Paul II in more ways than one. He was called by his German name Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger but as customary he picked a name from antiquity, of a person whom he admired. Saint Benedict was the choice, a Pope who was credited with helping Europe emerge more or less intact after the Dark Ages descended, when superstition, warfare and plague cost them more than 25 percent of their population.
Benedict the original did this by preserving what once was downgraded as the Pagan knowledge of unbelieving Greeks, Romans and Muslims, who had in their stead been preserving African Descended knowledge which was the well from which their civilizations drew sustenance.
Pope Benedict XVI is therefore his choice as it was a popular one before. Considering the demographical decline of Europe, and the disinclination of religion there, we can gain some insight into what the new Pontiff’s agenda will be.
With the insouciance of modernity, Benedict XVI was quickly being referred to in the newspapers and other media as “B 16.” By all accounts and his own writings he is no powder puff, and his official duty was to administer the papal office of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In short, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s old job was to prevent the wavering of agreed-upon beliefs by those of the Christian faith by issuing position papers and sometimes excommunicating the stiff necked.
In history the Cardinal’s office went by another name in the Middle Ages: The Inquisition! CLEANING OUT THE DEADWOOD
Cardinal Ratzinger’s work, which he pursued with typical German efficiency, has been the corralling of what has been derisively referred to as “Cafeteria Catholics,” those who think they can pick and choose what rules and edicts they want to follow. Which is not the way it works.
Notions that Catholic church leaders at the local level would even talk about supporting, let alone perform Homosexual Marriages of hairy-chested men and other abominations were actively suppressed by his office. Although the expulsion of intransigents might be considered a drastic measure, it sure as hell beats the old punishments!
Some have read a great deal into this new choice, and to the prospect of change within the Catholic Church. They may as well try and read the entrails of a slaughtered farm animal, or read tea leaves. Its easier to pick Academy Award winners than to figure out what a 2,000 year old institution does. The only thing you can count on is that it usually does things slowly.
Remember, this is the institution that took over 400 years to forgive Galileo for temerically suggesting that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around as specified in Scripture. This despite the fact that for many years the Vatican had one of the best equipped astronomical laboratories in Europe, and knew he was right hundreds of years ago! Still, one must keep up a strong front. Change in the Catholic Church is akin to molasses flowing that’s been stored atop a glacier. Just not as fast.
The office of Pope is unique, it began before the ascension of nation-states, and has even come up in American history and politics. During the presidential candidacy of then Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy in the late 1950s, he was asked whether he would take instruction from Rome, following the Pope instead of the US Constitution. The question today seems silly, but in the middle of the last century religious differences loomed much larger then. We have become much more enlightened. Race and class are the issues now.
Another is the aspect that there is the Roman Catholic Church, and then there’s the American Catholic church. Although with just a teeny weensy bit of the global population of the massive billion-plus membership of Catholics who form most of Christianity outside America, their influence and money gives them power beyond their numbers.
The passing of the People’s Pope, dubbed by young people as “JP Two” and the outpouring of response by disparate peoples globally only underscores the popularity of the most well traveled and most linguistically talented of any Pope in modern history. His admirers, and they are many, pronounced that the once Karol Wojtyla’s passing was not a death, but a promotion.
JP2, 84 years old, bent and slowed from Parkinson’s disease and various ailments of age, it was an auspicious period near the Easter holiday. At the same time the court-ordered starving of the brain-damaged Florida patient Terry Schiavo also lay dying. Dying Well and aging gracefully is an art that we’ve gotten away from, but the Pope showed us how and in public, not hidden away from our sight but unashamed of the natural process of life and death, thereby serving as a living witness against the Culture of Death, capital punishment, and euthanasia.
PAPACY A NATURAL MAGNET FOR HUMOUR
This new popularity of the papacy hasn’t spared the office of lancing from comedians and others. When Jean Paul II was named there was some wagging talk of an exploitative new shower product called “Pope On A Rope.”
Jay Leno hasn’t spared the Papacy from jokes any more than he did Michael Jackson. In a recent monologue he said there was speculation that the next Pope could be a Cuban.
“There are some who say that if he’s elected, then the next Pope mobile would be a 1958 Buick.”
There was speculation that when the Conclave in Rome hadn’t picked a successor to John Paul II there would be headlines that asked “Got Pope?”
Although he was better known more for cloak and dagger novels such as being the inventor of the “Bourne Identity” series, Wisconsin-born author Robert Ludlum in the 1970s wrote a comedy novel and later sequel where an activist group plotted to kidnap the Pope, with the ransom being a dollar from every Catholic in the planet, a cool billion dollars. The upshot is that the Pope himself thought it was a pretty good idea, and went along willingly so as to make people confront their faith!
Sinead O’Connor, the former Lesbian and bald-headed Irish performer was featured on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. At the conclusion of her screeching song she pulled out a 8x10 photo of Jean Paul II and screaming “Fight The Power!” she ripped it in half. The now married and more subdued O’Connor hasn’t been interviewed for her present views as far as I’ve been able to determine.
It is interesting and telling, and testifies to this pope’s popularity and credibility widespread even among people who are far from Catholic, that JP2 apologized for his church’s involvement in the historical enslaving populations. This at a time when the “First Black President” William Jefferson Clinton wouldn’t even utter anything close to the concept in his two terms of office, while still enjoying the slavish devotion of millions of the African Descended as if he were truly a friend instead of an instrument of the New World Order!
There is a long and fruitful connection of African Descended and the Catholic Church. There’s a good chance that in about a decade the next Pope might be another African, either the Nigerian or the South African candidate. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has said he wouldn’t be overly concerned if the next Pope wasn’t a Black African if he was of the same mold as JP2.
Not far from the Vatican is a transplanted Ethiopian obelisk in the heart of Rome. You can see it at < http://npr.org >.There has long been a historical connection between the Eternal City and Northeast Africa, from the Greek-named Egypt south to Ethiopia. After the Romans conquered the Greeks, they sought to imitate their classical connections. It was a well known fact that the Greeks studied in Africa, and so it was logical for their Roman conquerors to go there as well.
This is the reason that Benito Mussolini, Fascist leader of Italy and co-conspirator with other Axis leader’s Hitler and Tojo, made a move on Ethiopia and North Africa to reestablish the Italian/Roman empire during World War II.
Many of us with a knowledge of history were chaffed at the mention by some whom you would think know better, for calls that it was “time for the first African Pope.”
First African Pope? I’m sure they meant fifth or so, if they are merely talking about geography and not just race, and if they knew anything meaningful about their own religion which would put them in the minority of Believers.
The Catholic Church was originally based in Northeast Africa and the Middle East don’t forget. The Church only became a European institution in the last 800 years or so, when the primacy of Rome overshadowed the other outposts. This is why its called the Roman Catholic Church, and the successor of the globe-spanning Holy Roman Empire that took over when the old Roman Empire fell. Before that the church was based in Northeast Africa in Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and locales such as Persia before it split into Iraq and Iran.
Still in Cairo, Egypt there are vestiges of the ancient Coptic Church with its clear African origins, and those who think they know something about their Christian religion are urged to delve into their mysteries and histories. It is disheartening to see how many preachers and pastors stand up every week in front of a congregation hungry for knowledge and guidance who themselves are so ignorant of the history and forces that created the institution and belief system that has formed the most important part of their lives.
The woeful mis-education of history must be briefly addressed. There have been Black Shoguns of the Japanese empire and Chinese emperors in antiquity. In fact, one Roman Emperor was called Africanus, but it was common to give names to people for the lands they conquered, like my label for Clinton’s murderous US Atty. General “Janet Reno of Waco” for example.
This is not like the false idea that there were three or four “Black US Presidents.” This error came about for, unlike the idea that negative campaigning is something that is new in our day have nothing on the political shenanigans of old. It was a common ploy to infer that the opponent was of African Descent to prove their unfitness for high office. In the mists of time the origins of the insult were lost. but some dilettantes still, in hearing the insult these members of the Just Found Outs will run and try and tell the Been Done Knowed.
But remember we’re talking about people who loudly and ignorantly proclaim their allegiance to the “King James Bible.” This without knowing anything about why King James of England took it upon himself to rewrite and re-illustrate the 6,000 year old Bible 400 years ago in the 1600s. While doing so he removed those traditional depictions of old African Descended divine imagery of which only far-flung vestiges remain, such as the paintings of Black Madonnas and Baby Jesuses -- plural -- in the Greek Orthodox churches of the Eastern Mediterranean and Baltic regions in Poland, Spain, Russia, and near Turkey.
And the very pronouncement points out that there are other Bibles to be considered. Even the Mormons of America, the Latter Day Saints have their own version. The Bible has been translated, rewrit, censored, and even with some chapters suppressed by some Christians so many times its no wonder they had to have major rewrite councils to fix the flaws over the two millennia of the Catholic church’s existence. Just a few of the major ones happened in the 600s, 1000s, 1200 and 1400s.
Then there are the matters of parts of the original Bible that were left out wholesale, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic Gospels, the Apocrypha, and the obvious clumsy chop job that was done on the Book of Genesis that had people populating an Earth that would oppress a kicked-out Cain.
Demographics tells the true tale of whether or not the church that has started its third millennia as a force on Earth will go on much longer as an institution. “The average Catholic of the future is going to be a 40 year old African woman... The average one now is a 40 years old Latin American woman,” said panel members on “ABC News This Week,” talking over each other as is their custom.
The African Asiatic Latin axis is vastly overtaking the Catholic population of Europe and America. This will mean more Bishops, Cardinals, more infrastructure, more enclave voters and hence more influence.
The backlash against another Black African Pope will be discounted, as it needs to be. For those stiff-necked, hard-headed ones, time will take care of them. And a 2,000 year old Catholic Church has always known what to do with long amounts of time at its disposal, and an implacable belief that it is right in what it does, even if it believes in things it knows ain’t true.
THE PAPACY STUMBLES:
Still, there are snags even here in the message to the African Descended and its growing appeal in the continent, even as a reaction against the negative societal influences of Islam. Aside from the unworkable and of course widely ignored celibacy issue, the papal edicts against birth control, even condom use has been seen as a veritable death sentence for regions being ravaged by poverty and AIDS.
Whole villages are being depopulated and millions of “AIDS Orphans” roam, rootless, homeless, undisciplined and destitute as the grandparents or relatives themselves die out or are themselves affected by the modern plague. This prevents large swaths of the already under populated continent of Africa from enjoying any type of monetary upswing of a global economy.
SHARE THE CATHOLIC WEALTH
“To whom much is given, much is required” is an old concept, and one which JP2 repeated often. This was underscored when he ventured into public policy pronouncements as he urged the nations of the planet to essentially Share The Wealth. This is an easy thing to say when its always somebody else’s wealth you’re talking about.
But I’ve been to Vatican city, as these pictures show. When sunbeams sliced into the curved basilica and struck the gilded thrones and decorations it made me wish I’d bought a pair of the sunglasses from one of the various vendors who clog the streets outside the enclave. The Church could go a long way in alleviating poverty through a prudent divestment of its vast worldwide holdings.
If that would be too harsh, there are things the Vatican Bank could do insofar as helping establish low interest loans in developing nations, and aiding trade that would let poor nations feed themselves as they did before their economies were destroyed by centuries of Colonialism, aided and abetted by a compliant catholic church. Just a suggestion.
THEY TELL YOU, YOU DON’T TELL THEM NEW KINDER, GENTLER POPE?
The idea that a mortal man can one day be just a guy, and the next day after being named Pope by a bunch of other men can now be infused with some godly power by being selected to being Infallible, and whose word about matters of faith mayn’t be questioned is one that even many Catholics only pay lip service to, since they know they’re believing in things they know ain’t true.
This is especially in earthly matters such as premarital sex, birth control, divorce, and the basic covetousness and materialism of everyday life. However the urgings that the Catholic church “must change with the times” illustrates their divorce from understanding the appeal of Catholicism for many people in the Twentieth century, with technology, gene splicing, gay marriage, and terrorism.
There is a placid Island of Non-Change, an immutable oneness in the church that takes pride in not changing just because the times change, or turning this way and that with the winds of fashion and relativism. There are Truths are immutable, and there are things that are Absolute. There are things that just are, it is what it is.
It also should be pointed out that the Papacy is not a democracy; it just sometimes seems that way.
There is an immense appeal to people for this stability, for a doctrine that is free from the vagaries of what people think it should be. What we think or feel is not of the slightest importance. Doctrine, or the interpretation of Scripture is done by those who have been charged with the job by the Big Guy -- and who only picked other guys to carry out His will, by the way.
So let there be no further talk of Women Priests, no matter that business about the early Cult of the Marys that was stamped out early on. Conveniently forgetting things that are right in front of their faces is something that Catholics learned to do very well.
Or as the child was said when asked to define Faith said, “Faith is believing in things you know ain’t true.” From out of the mouths of babes and all that.
It is interesting that the Polish Pope himself was from a land that venerated Maryam, the mother of Yeshua/Jesus, who some hold to have been the vessel into which was poured the essence of the Divine Manifestation of God on Earth, or his Son, or both; thereby becoming directly connected to two parts of the Holy Trinity.
In fact, there are some who hold that with Mary the symbolism of the Trinity, pictured as a equilateral Triangle /\ should instead be a square [_] with Maryam being one of the corners in addition to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Or if you prefer the Vulgate Latin, “Patria, Filius, Y Spiritum Sanctum.” The oppressed Cult of Mary, and the Gnostic Gospels that indicate the presence of women were once more pronounced in early church hierarchy is deserving of a future article all its own, and so it shall be.
The former Polish quarry worker, playwright, poet and actor knew what it was to live under Communist dictates. That experience, and that he didn’t come up too early in the seminary before experiencing being “In The World” doubtless coloured his administration of the papacy.
Karol Wojtyla did a lot in his time in the papacy and fully lived up to his label as Pontifex Maximus, Latin for “The Great Bridge Builder.” In South America they called him Juan Paulo or Papa. In Italian he was Giovanni Paulo.
JP2 also was the first Pope in hundreds of years to visit a Muslim Mosque. As the Pontifex Maximus, the “Great Bridge Builder,” he reached out to Buddhists and other faiths which had no connection to Christianity, and the lamentations of his passing were heard in temples, synagogues and mosques across the world.
This is why Pope John Paul II has captured the popularity of the people and auspiciously that of the young. In a time of permissiveness and licentiousness, an octogenarian from Poland who has spent the last few years in poor health from Parkinson’s disease, and then lingered near death as crowds kept watch outside his Vatican apartment has made it seem that the sexual revolution is an asterisk; MTV’s reach is hardly felt, and Catholicism is cool with its message of selfly denial, duty, and a higher calling to care for the least of us.
Since Catholics tend to have high birthrates the demographics say that half of all Catholics, and all of the young ones have only known Pope John Paul II, the third longest reigning Pope.
In his former life as Karol Wojtyla the former dramatist turned anti-communist activist he had a sense of timing, and knew how to reach a crowd for maximum effect.
“JP 2! WE LOVE YOU!” was the melodic chant at colossal Catholic Youth Rallies throughout Europe and Latin America. In St. Louis and other cities when the touring Pope made one of his trips to the US, young people clogged the streets, jostling to get a better look. Longview, Texas News-Journal columnist Ana Pecina Walker attended one such rally in Toronto, Canada.
The wizened Pontiff took his seat, and always on stage, addressing the mic like an old pro and replying in their same cadence said to the chanting throng once they were done:
“Pope John Paul // Loves You All”
As Ms. Walker writes “if he didn’t have them in the palm of his hand before, he had them then.”
POPE’S GOT THE INTERNET HOOK UP: “YOU’VE GOT PRAYERS!”
She also referenced the stage training that allowed the Pope to make use of modern technology as he criss-crossed the globe, making use of his Blackberry PDA and the 17 languages he knew as he cemented the power and influence of the Catholic church from the Philippines to Eastern Europe, and Canada to Argentina.
There is even a Papal Website, with his own email address. The Vatican has its own Country Code suffix, which is < dot-va. > With over a billion Catholic penitents, trying to read them all would be a chore and a half, even with a divine hookup.
This brought to mind the scene in “Bruce Almighty” when Morgan Freeman handed over his duties as God to the whining believer. To deal with the prayers of people constantly coming in and inundating his head, Bruce whipped up his own divine email service. The announcement chirpily announced “You’ve Got Prayers!”
Clearly, something was going on with the Church that most of the observers, pollsters and media have missed. Here were young people moving toward John Paul II, the most strict Pope in generations; someone who said that we must have a “Culture of Life” to combat the Culture of Death that infests too many areas of the West, replacing it with one which values God-given life at all its stages; opposing even capital punishment, and forgiving the would be assassin who popped him during an assembly in St. Peter’s Square, even meeting with the Turkish Muslim in his jail cell.
Not for nothing are there calls for his expedited canonization, leading to his elevation to eventual sainthood. The Catholic church isn’t known for swiftness in anything, and the process sometimes can take centuries. There are people being sainted who were first proposed in the Middle Ages! But there are ways, as JP2 himself found, expediting Mother Teresa’s process from the usual five year span after her death to one year.
During the recent funeral in Rome the lobbying came early from the people themselves. They chanted in Italian during the gatherings in St. Peter’s Square “Santos Subitos” or “Sainthood Now!” Others were calling him John Paul 2 Maximus, or “The Great.” Only two or three other popes are referred to by that honourific.
JP2 confronted the Communist overlords in his native Poland before he was even a priest. Later, he addressed the denizens of those behind what was called the Iron Curtain and told them. “Be Not Afraid.” This simple pronouncement, stated in the stilted style, came from a heritage of moral force such as that employed by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., simple and elegant. He effectively dismissed the Communists as any long-term concern, and he was right.
Within a few years behind the political Conservative united front of US President Ronald Reagan, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, and Canadian president Mulroney; the Berlin Wall was down, the satellites of the Warsaw Pact nations were declaring their independence, and the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more, with some of the most vociferous demonstrations coming from the Pope’s own native Poland, which was characterised as not a communist country but a Catholic country under domination by the communists.
One of the lingering sources of conflict between European Jewry was over the blind eye that was turned to how the Holocaust, or as they call it the Shoa, played out against them in lands the Germans took over that were also Catholic. While many Christians ended up in camps themselves for helping hide their Jewish neighbors during World War II, the Catholic Church decades later is still being hit with the charge that they paid their Italian Fascist hosts back by not opposing the state sponsored genocide of half of all European Jews, and a quarter of those then on the planet that were being undertaken by their wartime German partners.
One of the enduring legacies of Pope John Paul is that he sought to actively heal those historical wounds. The title of Pontiff is from the Latin, the original word was Pontifex, or “Bridge Builder” from the times when people were separated from each other geographically. Much like the term given to Lawgivers such as Moses, Hammaurabi, and Buddha, it was a title of great honour. The Pope was the carrier across-er, the expeditor of people from this world to the Beyond of the Big Guy.
Karol Wojtyla, Bishop of Krakow of course knew of the infamous Jewish ghetto and the atrocities committed by the Nazis there on the nearly half-millennium old section they’d been confined to since the Middle Ages. Stephen Spielberg’s excellent “Schindler’s List” didn’t even go into some of the more horrific things that were done, such as using babies thrown out of high windows for target practice for sharpshooters.
Poland’s history of anti-Jewish sentiment was buried because of identification of it as a besieged country, first by invasion by the Germans in 1939, then a takeover by the Soviet army in 1945. Catholicism there went underground. Lech Walesa, the Baltic sea dock worker of Solidarity was the one who remarked that Poland was always a Catholic country under domination by Communism. But the streak of anti-Jewish attitude even with the country as a prime Nazi killing ground wasn’t mollified. (The Germans didn’t put concentration camps on their own land, preferring to poison the ground of others with their crimes against humanity).
Perhaps this is JP2 went out of his way to make amends for the malign neglect shown the plight of persecuted Jews; as a young man he saw firsthand the heavy hand of hate and religious intolerance.
NEXT POPE’S PLATE IS FULL UP
Pope John Paul’s 26 year term of office, so to speak, was the third longest in all of church history and they have a long one. Still, his successor will have to field a host of problems that continue to vex the catholic church including the always persistent problems of interacting with earthly governments: White Europeans leaving the church while the greatest increases are occurring in Latin America, Africa and Asia; a possible billion dollar settlement payout to Homosexual predator priests from American parishes; the connected matters of allowing priests to marry, and ordaining women that many say would go a long way toward alleviating the growing priest shortage and homosexual priests in the first place.
Pope John Paul II traveled to synagogues, and acknowledged that logically the beliefs of the Hebrew faith is the parent to Christianity. This went a long way towards erasing the bad taste from the lassitude of the Papacy and the bureaucracy during the extermination of Jews in World War II, and the historical designation as Jews as “Christ Killers.”
This nonsense was seized on by among others White Supremacist organizations such as the World Church Of The Creator as they worshipped a Man of African Descent who was a Hebrew, but advocated and carried out acts of violence against his people! Some of the racists have realized their logical inconsistency and lately are shifting their religious allegiance to European Nordic gods such as Odin and Thor who have no Christian connection, and hence not tainted by being of colour from a Mediterranean region filled with them, especially over 6,000 years ago.
Here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin there was a famous Catholic priest named Father Groppi whose White features, with his trademark sunglasses are prominent in many a community mural that graces our buildings. He was a cool priest with an inner city parish at St. Boniface church. In a city noted for its hyper segregation Father Groppi personally led protest marches to the city’s once infamous Southside, where heckling White people lined the streets after the Viaduct bridge across the Menominee Industrial Valley that figuratively and actually separated the Polish and African Descended communities.
This was the basis for the insightful local riddle:
Q: “Why are the Viaducts the longest bridges in the world?
A: Because they go all the way from Africa to Poland!”
Groppi’s church was a meeting place for activists during the Open Housing Marches of the middle to late 1960s in a city that was referred to as the “Selma of the North” for its Hyper Segregation and heavy-handed treatment of the African Descended which continues to this day. This takes the form of the suppression of the development of a large Black middle class, or sufficient educational opportunities even in a city like Milwaukee that is almost 50 percent Black and had a Black interim Mayor, a Black former Police chief, two Black common council presidents, and a chairman of the County board.
The NAACP national conference nevertheless is slated to be held in Milwaukee in Mid-July, over the growing objections of a small but vocal group of activists who want Milwaukee to be punished not rewarded, with the approximately $30 million dollars that will primarily go to White downtown hoteliers and merchants.
Priests such as Father Groppi and the legions of others throughout the Americas is what has caused penetration of the catholic church to the hordes of the impoverished in teeming cities and far flung villages.
The Activist priest Father Groppi’s heirs and descendants are the Latin American warrior priests and slain nuns protesting inequitable land acquisition policies; and those like the late Archbishop Romero who face down fascists death squads created by the privileged who don’t want any of their property divided. The Catholic Church in some lands actually stands for something, and the masses of people have been responsive.
THE INFLUENCE OF “THE JEZZIES;” JESUITS R THA ORIGINAL ENFORCERS
I’m not a Catholic, but I attended Marquette University which is a Jesuit Institution. In fact while in college I was a photo model in a brochure for the Jesuit Universities of the Midwestern States, or JUMS.
Now, to anybody who has studied Medieval history they know that the Jesuit order is the most militaristic of all the Catholic Orders, a legacy of the Crusades, although its the most liberal of the various Orders. The “Black Pope” that there may be references to in parts of people interpretations of Revelations may also refer to the black uniform of the Jesuit order, since they were supposed to be schemers par excellance.
It is also a part of the dichotomy that is inherent in a church that had to blend various cultures, ideologies, disciplines and dogmas that most of the insurrectionists and Heretics hunted down and punished by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have come from “the Jezzies,” as they are nicknamed, some who have often felt they themselves are the True Defenders of Christian doctrine, even from an Infallible Pope!
This hails from the Jesuit Guild’s heritage as soldiers forged in war during the multiple Medieval Crusades against Islam, and the drive to “liberate” Jerusalem from the heathen Mohammedans who moved into it, as they drove eastward in their conquest that would take them deep into the south of Europe a where their influence is felt to this day. The architectures of Spain and southern France, and the “onion towers” of Russia serve witness to the Muslim penetration deep into Europe.
The Eastern Orthodox Church is still commonly called the Greek Orthodox Church. Based in the area around Greece and Russia they feel they are the only rightful inheritors of the original Christian doctrine, and were free of the polluting of the original message that happened to th
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