REX News Agency: Carl Bildt thinks Eastern Orthodoxy is main threat to western civilisation | Agora Dialogue

Please note that we post this only for information about a significant statesman's perspective on Eastern Christianity. Please see the item on line (below) to read various responses. From the report, setting to one side his views on the policies of the Russian state, he seems to be unaware of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, let alone of nature of the Orthodox Church in many contexts and cultures, increasingly prominent in diaspora and even domiciled as indigenous Churches in the lands where there faithful live among Western Christians far removed from their lands and cultures of origin in both time and space. It is surprising that Bildt sees "Eastern Orthodoxy" as the main threat to "Western civilisation" for three reasons. First, his own country of Sweden has been one of the most accommodating of European countries to Christian refugees from Iraq, significantly Sodertalje, now a centre for both Assyrians (the Church of the East) and Syriac Orthodox. Sweden is believed to have accepted more refugees from Iraq than the USA and Canada combined. Their Churches see themselves as Orthodox and belong to the wider family of ancient, apostolic Churches to which the Byzantine Orthodox Churches or Russia and Ukraine, not to mention the Greek Catholic Churches of both Eastern Europe and the Middle East also belong. Secondly, as all these refugees from the Middle East will attest, the great threat to civilisation that they have experienced and which now faces the West is not "Eastern Orthodoxy" but radical Islamism, a perversion of the Islam of the Muslims that they have lived among for a millennium and a half, which has brought their Churches to the brink of extinction even in the lands of those who to this day speak the language of Christ. Third, both the Catholic Church and "Eastern Orthodoxy", as manifested in the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, are in express agreement that the greatest threat to Western civilisation is itself - from its secularism, relativisation of truth (including the Christian principles of European culture, government, jurisprudence, and institutional and economic dealings), environmental and economic exploitation and its embrace of the "culture of death" - as evident in the legal facilitation of abortion of conceived human beings and abortifacients, and of euthanasia, even of children. Hence Pope Benedict's establishment of a movement for New Evangelisation of Old Europe, and joint comments from both Rome's and Moscow's church leaders on the Church's struggle for the soul of Europe.


Stockholm. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and one of the architects of the EU Eastern policy, thinks Russia has changed for the worse in the past several years. While it demonstrated attachment to western values in the first decade after the Soviet Union fell apart and tried to impose them on its citizens, Russia’s current leadership takes a firm stand against the West, the Russian agency REX reported.


In the words of Mr Bildt, Vladimir Putin demonstrates attachment not to world but to Eastern Orthodox values, which becomes clear from a Twitter post of his [Bildt’s]. ”The new anti-west and anti-decadent line [of conduct] of Putin is based on the deep conservatism of Eastern Orthodox ideas,” Carl Bildt is convinced.



The Swedish minister explains the striving to destroy the Ukrainian church and bring the Ukrainian autocephaly back into the fold of the Moscow Patriarchate with Putin’s striving to gain control over Ukraine. But precisely Eastern Orthodoxy, according to Bildt, is the main threat to western civilisation.



REX: Carl Bildt thinks Eastern Orthodoxy is main threat to western civilisation | Agora Dialogue