Secularism will not survive the demographic change in France - nor in Europe israelnationalnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from israelnationalnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Pope John Paul II visited Poland in 1979.
His arrival was met by hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens who had suffered under socialism since the 1945 Yalta Conference, when Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill surrendered Poland to Stalin at the end of World War II.
The Popeâs visit sparked an unprecedented spiritual revival in Poland.
The next year, labor leader Lech Walesa, rallied Polish citizens to reject socialism and establish a free representative government.
This sparked uprisings in other communist countries, and by 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.
Pope John Paul II stated:
âThe fundamental error of socialism is ⦠(it) considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism.â
He went on to add that the clergy of the Orthodox church was heavily involved in the Greek war of independence and that this was the reason so many flags during the revolution featured Christian crosses.
The comments from Ieronymos II come just months after he condemned the move by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to convert the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, 86 years after the former cathedral had been made into a museum.
“The insult and hubris do not attain only Orthodox Christianity, or even Christianity as a whole, but the whole civilised humanity, any thinking human being, irrespective of religion,” Ieronymos II said last July.