European Americans United and Western Voices offer our Eastern Orthodox Christian members, supporters, readers and friends a happy Orthodox Christmas.
The Eastern Orthodox churches hail from http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3479, parts of the Baltic nations and Poland, Moldova, and, of course, Russia, the most populous white nation in the world. Next to Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy is the second largest Christian communion. Orthodoxy is also present in all Western nations, brought with the likes of the hardy Russian pioneers who settled, for example, parts of Alaska and California, and strengthened by refugees fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Orthodox faith gave white people an ideological and cultural focus that united our folk on the Eastern European front lines in the face of relentless nonwhite invasion, from the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3204 (1502–1585) instituted calendar reforms when new calculations found that the Old Calendar was 11 minutes, 14 seconds too long. A Jesuit named Christopher Clavius came up with the new calendar (later improved by Johannes Kepler), and in 1582 the Gregorian Calendar moved the date of Christmas Day from January 7 back to December 25.
The change was slow in being adopted; the "New Style" was not civilly instituted in England and its colonies in America until 1752. In Orthodox nations, the calendar change was not made partly because of the legacy of the Great Schism of AD 1054, when the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches parted company. As a result, the Orthodox viewed Roman Catholic decisions with suspicion. Another reason was that many of the Orthodox nations were then http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4395, and thus their churches had little power to enact such a change. (The Turks used the "millet" system, which allowed religiously identified "dhimmi" (infidel) population groups some degree of autonomy in civil legal matters, but did not tolerate political independence).
The Gregorian civil system was unevenly adopted across Europe, with the Soviet Union in 1919 being the last to institute it officially. This was mainly an http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2595 peasant conscripts to desecrate Roman Catholic churches, which, along with all church property, were confiscated. The desecrations were an attempt to implicate the Spaniards in anticlerical acts, part of the effort to terrorize and indoctrinate the Spanish people, whose deep religious faith was both a stumbling block for Communist power and an object of extreme hatred for the commissars, largely ethnic Jews sent in by the Kremlin to "direct" the revolution. Spain’s Red Terror saw the murders of over a dozen bishops and an estimated seven thousand clergy; in some places well over half the local clergy were slaughtered. We know of these figures because Communists and their "Loyalist" henchmen, many of whom were foreign mercenaries, only had power from 1936 to 1939 before being crushed by Nationalist insurgents. With hatred and violence so extreme in such a comparatively short period, the scale of what the Church in Russia and other areas conquered by the Soviets is mind boggling.
But the Orthodox faithful know how to suffer and persevere. While Communism is now only a painful memory in the former Soviet Union, churches are full and leading a Russian cultural renaissance. But the Christmas season, particularly, persists as a target. The power of cultural symbols like Christmas is the reason why the Communists attacked the church, and the same kind of hate is http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6213 in the West today.
The equivalent of the "Merry Christmas" greeting in Serbia is "Hristos se Rodi!" ("Christ is born!"), to which is said "Vaistinu se rodi!": "He is born indeed!"