• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Pope, in Slovakia, says don’t exploit religion for politics

September 14, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

September 14, 2021

By Philip Pullella

PRESOV, Slovakia (Reuters) – Pope Francis said on Tuesday that the cross should not be used as a political symbol and warned against Christians trying to be triumphalist, in an apparent criticism of the use of religion for partisan ends.

Francis flew to the city of Presov, in eastern Slovakia, where he presided at a long service known as a Divine Liturgy, a Byzantine rite used by Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

The pope wove his homily around the theme of Christian identity, saying crosses and crucifixes were often used superficially by Christians.

Speaking to about 30,000 worshippers, he said many Christians had crucifixes or crosses around their necks, on walls in their homes, in their cars and in their pockets but had no real relationship with Jesus.

“What good is this, unless we stop to look at the crucified Jesus and open our hearts to him,” he said. “Let us not reduce the cross to an object of devotion, much less to a political symbol, to a sign of religious and social status.”

In 1950 in Presov, the communist authorities forced the Eastern Rite Catholics, who owe their allegiance to the Pope, to join the Orthodox Church. A number of Eastern Rite clerics who refused were jailed.

APPEAL TO RELIGION

In Hungary, where the pope stopped briefly on Sunday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has appealed to religious sentiment in his anti-immigrant and nationalist politics, saying that Hungary’s Christian heritage risked disappearing.

After his meeting with the pope on Sunday, Orban said he asked the pontiff “not to let Christian Hungary perish”. The pope said in Hungary that the country could preserve its Christian roots while opening up to the needy.

At the liturgy on Tuesday, Francis also again appeared to warn Christians against the use of their religion in so-called culture wars that he believes hurt the common good.

“How often do we long for a Christianity of winners, a triumphalist Christianity that is important and influential,

that receives glory and honour?” he said.

In Slovakia, the far-right Kotlebovci-People’s Party Our Slovakia says it stands on three pillars – Christian, national and social – and has vowed to prevent immigration of mostly Muslim refugees.

“The cross is not a flag to wave, but the pure source of a new way of living,” Francis said, adding that a true believer “views no one as an enemy, but everyone as a brother or sister”.

A number of political parties in Europe, including several far-right parties in the east, use crosses on their party flags or symbols.

In Hungary, one of Orban’s government allies, the tiny Christian Democratic Peoples’ Party (KDNP), uses a cross on their symbol. The far-right nationalist Our Homeland Party (Mi Hazank) uses the Byzantine cross, which has two horizontal beams.

(Additional reporting by Robert Muller in Kosice and Gergely Szakac in Budapest; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Source Link Pope, in Slovakia, says don’t exploit religion for politics

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. US Health Officials Favor Covid Booster Shots To All Americans As Delta Variant Cases Rise
  2. Russian editor decries ‘destruction of media’ before election
  3. Daimler expects Mercedes Q3 sales significantly below Q2 – report
  4. Motor racing-Bottas rules out imminent announcement on his F1 future

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • “I Wasn’t Prepared For The Sheer Number Of Them”: Cave Of Mummified Never-Before-Seen Eyeless Invertebrates Amazes Scientists
  • Asteroid Day At 10: How The World Is More Prepared Than Ever To Face Celestial Threats
  • What Happened When A New Zealand Man Fell Butt-First Onto A Powerful Air Hose
  • Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements
  • Earth’s Weather Satellites Catch Cloud Changes… On Venus
  • Scientists Find Common Factors In People Who Have “Out-Of-Body” Experiences
  • Shocking Photos Reveal Extent Of Overfishing’s Impact On “Shrinking” Cod
  • Direct Fusion Drive Could Take Us To Sedna During Its Closest Approach In 11,000 Years
  • Earth’s Energy Imbalance Is More Than Double What It Should Be – And We Don’t Know Why
  • We May Have Misjudged A Fundamental Fact About The Cambrian Explosion
  • The Shoebill Is A Bird So Bizarre That Some People Don’t Even Believe It’s Real
  • Colossal’s “Dire Wolves” Are Now 6 Months Old – And They’ve Doubled In Size
  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • “Lizard Shampoo” And Pagan Texts Suggest “Dark Age” Medicine Wasn’t So Dark After All
  • Japanese Macaques May Mourn Their Dead – As Long As They’re Not Maggot-Infested
  • This Is What You’d Hear If You Listened To Voyager’s Golden Record NASA Sent To Interstellar Space
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version