BIG: Tucker Carlson in Russia already, to interview President Putin, Musk supports.

Well said!

 

Luan, while you are here to ask you... Since I said I follow the statistics, I am now waiting for you(Brazil) to release the results of the 2022 population census, i.e. I am interested in religion because it is not out yet. However, I saw that the Catholic Church fell from over 90% to 66% (1990-2010) and it is expected that it could already slip below 50% while Protestants rose from 7% to 22% and are expected to become most dominant group by 2030's...
I guess this is a worldwide phenomenon, what is the reason for such a decline of the Catholic Church in Brazil and the rise of Protestants in such a short time?

 

Evangelicals have been growing in numbers surprisingly in Brazil, reaching 30% of the population, as estimated by the 2022 Census. Some churches have also followed the expansion of believers, doubling the number of temples in the last decade.

Currently there are more than 100 thousand churches. The leaders in opening temples in the last decade were Pentecostals, with the Assembly of God in first place, which, between 2010 and 2019, opened more than 9 thousand churches across the country, a rise of 115% in ten years. It is followed by the Christian Congregation in Brazil, with 3,445 new churches in the last decade (92% increase). The third position is occupied by the Maranata Christian Church, which opened 1,530 temples (an increase of 35%).

In second place in the expansion ranking came neo-Pentecostal denominations. The best-known Brazilian neo-Pentecostal, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, opened 2,515 temples between 2010 and 2019. Another famous denomination in this group is the Worldwide Church of the Power of God, which created 2,310 places of worship in the same period.

https://www.jornalopcao.com.br/religiao/saiba-quais-as-igrejas-evangelicas-que-mais-cresceram-no-brasil-512041/

 

This is partly because there is faster training for the ministry of a pastor in (a matter of months) than for a priest, which can take years. I have noticed that people often fall into a state of despair, addiction or depression and end up turning to neo-Pentecostal temples that change their lives. However, I don't see this phenomenon so much in the Lutheran church and the Presbyterian church, which is very conservative and has pastors with a more educated background such as Hernandes Dias Lopes and Augustus Nicodemus.

 

Here in Brazil there is a very significant force of televangelism; such as TV programs (which rent part of the free-to-air TV programming), but also a strong political activism by pastors in politics, mainly in Congress; and this activism is confused with the fight against left-wing agendas in society and politics; Perhaps this partly explains the growth of evangelicals. Interestingly, in the 2022 presidential elections there was even an Orthodox priest as a candidate named Father Kelmon.

 

Vicar General of Eastern Catholics in Austria Urges International Community to Condemn Russian Terrorism

The Vicar General of the Vienna Archbishop for the faithful of the Eastern Catholic Churches in Austria, Fr. Yuriy Kolasa strongly condemned Russia’s recent rocket attacks on residential areas in Ukraine. On Thursday morning, some residential neighborhoods in Lviv were subject to shelling. Fr. Yuriy Kolasa’s mother was also injured. The blast wave smashed the windows in her apartment.



“This morning, it was minus 1 degree in Lviv. My sister lives in Lviv and is trying to tape the windows with plastic. But there are thousands of elderly people and people requiring care who are left alone in these inhumane conditions because they have no children or their children have left Ukraine.” His heart breaking at the sight of his old, helpless mother and many other people “forced to endure the cold in fear and despair in their own windowless apartment,” he said.

The clergyman further noted: “All those involved in these brutal attacks on residential neighborhoods, both those who give orders and those who directly execute them, as well as all those who justify such inhuman atrocities, should know that they are responsible before the Almighty. Lord, this is a blatant sin.”

Father Kolasa appealed to the Austrian public and the international community to condemn the “acts of state terrorism” committed by Russia. He also asked for prayers for the victims of the rocket attacks and “an end to this utterly absurd war.”

Fr. Yuriy expressed outrage at the recent interview with Vladimir Putin by American journalist Tucker Carlson: “To call Putin a Christian leader is profoundly cynical.” Christian leaders are those “who provide shelter to those displaced by war, protect the lives of millions of innocent children, enable them to live normal lives and attend school, all while providing basic social and medical care to women with children and, above all, to the elderly.”

Killing innocent children, shelling residential areas with rockets, threatening thousands of helpless older people and subjecting them to inhumane conditions, and forcing millions of women and children to flee their homes is anything but Christianity, said the Vicar General of the Archbishop of Vienna for the faithful of the Eastern Catholic Churches in Austria.

The UGCC Department for Information

This was reported by RISU with reference to Katpress.

Source:
https://ugcc.ua/en/data/vicar-gener...l-community-to-condemn-russian-terrorism-916/

 

On another note you have the Heralds of the Gospel in San Paulo I think.

 

How much of this apostasy is due to rejection by the apostates of liberation theology? How prominent among the priests is Catholic theology?

A late neighbour of mine was a retired missionary priest to Brazil. Given what I know of his views, I don't think he would have been very helpful.

 

I'm not so sure about the innocence of the priest, for one. Ann Barnhardt has updated her article, presumably in response to those who have issued denials. She says that it is clear in a video of the funeral that the priest was well aware of what was happening, commenting on the mode of dress (more precisely, un-dress) of those attending and referring to the deceased as 'Cecilia' and using the pronouns 'she' and 'her' regarding a man who was clearly a deceased male prostitute at a funeral attended by a group of shamelessly obvious male prostitutes. I cannot bring myself to watch the video, but I have grave reservations about what went on here, magnified by the misgivings of Father Z.

 

Well, Tucker got in the interview, but Navalny is now dead, probably killed, and it's difficult to know what to make of everything. Maybe Heaven's Peace Plan will involve converting Putin's heart to desiring Peace, and then, along with the Russian People, re-union with the Roman Catholic Church. I don't know, but it's possible. All I know is, given the Consecration of Russia, which Bp. Schneider and the SSPX etc and I believe has happened, the Conversion of Russia will follow in short time. Anyway, it is evident to almost everyone Russia will play a huge part in World Peace, and the destiny of the World is in many ways linked to the destiny of Russia. I hope the US gets conservative leadership soon and then opens up talks for Peace with Russia. I pray Russia too - assuming Putin killed Navalny - experiences a change or conversion of heart from the top down of its leadership, and an openness to attaining that freedom which Pope St. John Paul II willed for her, and to joining the Catholic Church in time. Might look difficult now, but Our Lady cannot fail.

 

Liberation theology is one of the factors in the rejection of Catholicism in Brazil, at least in terms of political support for communism and left-wing politicians. This makes Pope Francis extremely unpopular among supporters of former president Bolsonaro, who in 2022 received 58,206,354 votes (49.10% of valid votes).

 

Well, it's blessedly over. I'm leaving it to the Almighty Father.

 

I see that social issues have a lot of weight in priestly preaching in Brazil, which is still an application of the doctrine of the gospel. However, I don't see such energetic preaching from the clergy about progressive agendas that are imposed on us daily, such as gender ideology and homosexual activism. In the case of abortion, it is different. The head pastor of the Main Church of my parish preaches energetically against abortion but also routinely uses his preaching to talk about the issue of ecology and issues of social relevance, such as the demarcation of indigenous lands.

 

Please correct me if I am wrong. You certainly know a lot more about this than I do.

It seems liberation theology has devastated Catholic faith in Latin America.

Catholic priests talk about class warfare ecology and climate change.

Evangelicals talk about Jesus and salvation.

The poor, the downtrodden in Latin America couldn’t care less about carbon footprint, blessing of homosexual couples or cow farts.

They hunger for Jesus. They care about salvation.

Yes the evangelical discourse may be limited and imperfect.

But it’s relevant to them.

What father among you, if his son asks for a loaf of bread, will give him a stone; or if he asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent?

Luke 11:11

 

Counter-point from Return to Order: "Three mysteries in Putin’s “history lesson” concerned me, and I was surprised that many others did not see or want to see them. These mysteries cloud the figure of Putin as many wish to perceive him. They call into question his version of the Ukrainian conflict.

First Mystery: Soviet Russia’s Crimes Are Purged from Putin’s Historical Memory

The first mystery is Putin’s treatment of Russia’s Soviet past. Given his current Russian nationalist narrative, the interview would have been an ideal opportunity for him to complain of an outside Western ideology (Marxism) financed by an outside power (Germany) imposing itself upon Russia during the Soviet era, destroying its culture and civilization.

However, during the interview, Putin embraced the Marxist period as part of Russian history, sweeping the horrific crimes of the Soviet regime under the rug.

He found fault with Lenin and Stalin only for creating the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union “for unknown reasons.” The most he admitted during the whole interview was that there were some problems in “Stalin’s time, so-called Stalin’s regime—which, as many claim, saw numerous violations of human rights and violations of the rights of other states.”

Unmentioned in his “history lesson” were the Gulag Archipelago, Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall. Unmentioned also were the tens of millions who died in the Sovietization of the former Russian Empire. Especially missing are those who perished in the Ukrainian Holodomor, the 1931-1932 induced famine where at least four to five million Ukrainians starved to death. During the rambling interview, the word communism and its victims went unmentioned.

This former KGB lieutenant colonel did not lament the communist creation of an anti-Russia. There was no acknowledgment of an error, no apology for the crimes, and no indictment of the ideology that destroyed the Russia he claims to cherish.

Unmentioned also was the joy of hundreds of millions when the brutal regime finally imploded and the Wall of Infamy came down."

From: https://www.returntoorder.org/2024/02/the-three-mysteries-of-vladimir-putins-two-hour-talk-show/

 

"Second Mystery: The Amnesia Regarding the Ruthless Persecution of the Catholic Church

The second mystery was Putin’s similar omission in his “history lesson” of the persecution of the Catholic Church. I would expect my fellow Catholics to be familiar with the tragic history of the Catholic Church in Ukraine and the rest of the U.S.S.R. under Communism.

Putin constantly identified Russia with Orthodoxy. “Orthodoxy, Eastern Christianity, deeply rooted itself in the consciousness of the Russian people.”

He likewise made this generalization regarding Ukraine (which he considers an integral part of Russia) and insisted that Ukraine shares a common faith with Russia.

What Does Saint Thomas Aquinas Say About Marriage?
Such a depiction dismisses and ignores the nearly five million Ukrainian Catholics now free to practice their Faith. There is a constant anti-Catholic overtone in Putin’s telling of history. He reduces these Catholics to foreign, illegitimate and Western elements implanted into Russian soil. He turns faith into a geographical, not theological, matter.

Indeed, Putin was silent on how the Soviet regime under Stalin ordered a 1946 Lviv synod to decree the forced “reunification” of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics with the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1949, the Greek Catholic church in Transcarpathia was likewise abolished. The Greek Catholic Church went underground during the decades of Soviet rule while willing Orthodox accomplices confiscated and occupied its churches.

After the fall of Communism, Catholic bishops and clergy emerged and reclaimed their churches. Clergy and entire congregations converted to the Catholic Church from Orthodoxy.

Ukrainian Catholics know full well that if Putin succeeds in his goal to swallow Ukraine into Russia again, he will do his utmost to obliterate the Catholic Faith from Ukraine. Those Catholics who revere Putin should pay close attention to the voiced fears of their fellow Catholics in Ukraine."

 

"Third Mystery: Putin’s Very Modern View of Religion

The final mystery in the Tucker Carlson interview was Putin’s refusal to talk about God. Inside the narrative where he plays God’s champion, he should be expected to proclaim his Christian Faith.

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Tucker Carlson made such a mention easy by asking a soft-ball question: “You are a Christian leader by your own description. So, what effect does that have on you?”

Putin’s reply was to avoid any personal reference to faith or specific belief. Orthodoxy is only mentioned as a nationalist label identifying the Russian people.

Putin’s vision of religion in the interview was a liberal one of religious indifference. When he mentioned that Russia “absorbed nations” who professed Islam, Buddhism and Judaism, he omitted saying anything about the Catholic Faith. However, Putin ecumenically claimed the equality of all religions, saying, “the main postulates, main values are very similar, not to say the same, in all world religions I’ve just mentioned.”

Nor were his references to Divine worship profound. He said religion is “not about external manifestations, it’s not about going to church every day or banging your head on the floor. It is in the heart.” To him, it was much more about the dark genius of Dostoevsky (whom he referenced) than the sublime works of Saint John Chrysostom (347-407), the Catholic author of the Eastern liturgy mainly used by Orthodoxy everywhere.

God’s Role in History

Tucker Carlson gave the Russian leader one more chance to manifest his faith by asking him if he saw the supernatural or God in what is happening in the world today. Did he recognize “forces that are not human” at work?

Far from Constantine’s vision of victory through the Cross of Christ before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312), Vladimir Putin’s answer to Carlson was a crushingly disappointing “no.”

His vision of history was not driven by God but by materialistic power—a perspective with both Marxist and Nietzschean overtones.

“My opinion is that the development of the world community is in accordance with the inherent laws, and those laws are what they are. It’s always been this way in the history of mankind. Some nations and countries rose, became stronger and more numerous, and then left the international stage, losing the status they had accustomed to.”

Indeed, in Putin’s view, the fall of the Roman Empire was due to the growing economic power and development of the barbarians—a Marxist perspective. There is no mention of the triumph of Christianity as a major factor in the rise of the West."

 

"Rejecting the Charade

Thus, the Putin interview was shrouded in mystery and clarified nothing. The interview seemed designed to open up passionate debates about the details of past events, which will persuade neither side. There appeared to be a desire not to solve problems but rather to multiply them ad infinitum with mutual recriminations—some of them legitimate.

Putin’s omissions about the unnaturalness and crimes of Communism cast doubt on his narrative since it would have been so easy for him to condemn this scourge of humanity that so destroyed his country. Putin’s unmentioned Soviet goal to eliminate the Catholic Church in Ukraine should lead Catholics worldwide to withdraw sympathy.

Putin’s shallow notions of the impact of religion on history should lead us to see no future in his program. We see in his views a twisted, mixed bag of nineteenth-century philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx that have brought us to where we are today.

Nothing in Putin’s ideas and actions presages the refreshing movement of God’s grace that has converted peoples and changed history through the ages. His revisionist musings have nothing to do with the message of Our Lady of Fatima that promised Russia’s conversion.

Until these mysteries are resolved, I cannot engage in this debate with this false narrative. It is not a serious conversation. It is a talk show."

 

The TV host and the dictator 2.0



In America, Tucker Carlson, fired last year from his bully pulpit at Fox News, is known for his biting sarcasm and derisive cynicism.

Yet, in Russia, he recently met, in the course of a two-hour interview, the master of gaslighting and Orwellian tactics, whose cynicism is uniquely insidious. It is, tragically, at the root of wars and genocide, crimes against humanity, the murders of journalists and opposition politicians. The “defender of traditional values” who belittles the morals of the West, and surreptitiously strives to shake Western, especially American, democratic foundations, has for a quarter-century led Russia, guided by the goal of a neo-imperial glory. And under him, Russia indeed remains a global leader — in abortions and divorces, alcoholism and suicide, and of course, systemic, pervasive, all-embracing state corruption.

So serpentine was his interviewee that Carlson himself was occasionally confounded, especially when he asked about the release of the imprisoned Wall Street Journal writer, Evan Gershkovich. Attempting to score political points back home, Carlson called for “the kid” to be released, receiving a barrage of sarcastic retorts.

There is a saying popular in the former Soviet Union: “Once you start playing cards with a cardsharp, you’ve already lost.” When two cardsharps play, the truth gets lost, because if one person lies and another speaks the truth, the truth is never in the middle. Actually, the truth is not a compromise between the left and the right, a middle road between speaker/position 1 and speaker/position 2. The truth is where it is. Throughout Carlson’s interview with Putin, truth was nowhere to be found.

It appears Carlson was handpicked by the Russian propaganda machine. Why? To broadly disseminate false messages? To dissuade a conservative audience from supporting Ukraine? There were threatening undertones, dire warnings to the West, particularly the United States. For Putin, Europeans don’t really count; they’re feeble and fragile. Yet his most caustic disdain is reserved for America. It oozes from every narrative and image. It is particularly noticeable when you listen to the intonations of the answers in the original Russian. As he does in real life, throughout the conversation Putin sought to disparage and undermine American democracy, while demeaning an ultimately inconsequential Europe.

And Carlson, avowed warrior for all things all-American, did nothing to challenge the world’s greatest America-hater. On the contrary, he provided a platform from which Putin could project his loathing for the West and his fabrications about it: It was America that provoked Russia to attack Ukraine. Just as Poland “provoked” Hitler to invade it in 1939.

Throughout the interview, Putin implied and celebrated a shifting world order: the decline of Western, particularly American, ideals and leadership, a “reality” to which the West must acquiesce. Soviet/Russian wisdom has been presaging the moral, political and economic decay of the “rotting” (sic) West for a full century, with Moscow in the meantime perpetrating genocide against its own people time and time again.

Lord knows, we have many problems in the U.S. They are manifold, manifest and mounting. Still, few Americans would trade their domestic trials for the Russian wonderland. Have you heard of many refugees of the “rotting West” clamoring to live in Putin’s Nirvana? One of the consequences of Putin’s war has been the exodus of a million of the best educated (and young) Russian scientists, entrepreneurs, professors, computer specialists, doctors, artists and journalists from the dictator’s paradise. They fled so as not to become cannon fodder in a wicked, ignominious campaign of genocide against a Slavic neighbor.

Yet there were no questions from Carlson about why President Putin is sending his people to death by the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. Or about his indictment by the International Criminal Court for being personally responsible for the abduction of 20,000 Ukrainian children. Or about Russia being ranked 164th in the World Press Freedom index out of 180 countries monitored — matters that might be of interest to a true journalist.

When speaking of Western leaders, Putin can make a cuckoo sign or knock on wood — not for good luck, but to insinuate the West’s folly and denseness. Why is the West daft? Because it refuses to negotiate with Russia. No matter the guarantees of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity that Russia promised in the1994 negotiations after which Ukraine unilaterally gave up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal — greater than that of the United Kingdom, France, and China combined. Those that ingenuously negotiated in the past with Russia no longer count the betrayals, and understandably no longer negotiate.

What is the Russian president’s understanding of negotiations? He repeatedly emphasizes the Russian word “dogovarivatsia” with various inflections. To come to an agreement, to cut a deal. Not once does it sound like negotiation, consultations, mutual listening. It’s more akin to bargaining or menacing — we must reach an agreement, otherwise… Putin’s neo-imperial, autocratic mindset and policy is clearly not guided by values such as God-given human dignity, freedom, or other principles which flow out of the Gospel and which are at the root of democracies and Western civilization.

There are — in Putin’s world — only interests. “Why bother about a country so far away?” he asks Americans. “Why should Germans pay for expensive gas when they can compel Ukraine to open the pipelines?” he wonders. Why do Ukrainians persist in resisting? Why won’t they surrender? For Putin, courage and valor in defending one’s dignity or protecting the innocent or doing what is right is simply not rational. It’s dippy and daft.

Even when asked a rather personal question about the significance of the Orthodox faith for him, Putin responds with the imperial “we” and references the history of the 10th century and Volodymyr the Great, Grand Prince of Kyiv, which happens to be the capital of Ukraine. With this question, Tucker Carlson attempted to expose at least a trace of humanity in the Russian president — without success.

For Putin, Christian faith is an ideological device, part of the imperial scheme. In a 30-minute historical disquisition he explained what he believes kept Rus’ together and what should be a model for today: “a unified,” i.e., colonial territory, “tight economic ties,” i.e., those that subjugate “lesser peoples,” and “a common,” i.e., imposed, language, “one,” i.e. unquestioning, formal, faith and … “the power of the prince.”

Putin’s tedious and tawdry ancient and medieval history lesson was immediately debunked by numerous historians and fact-checkers. Its genocidal leitmotivs were precisely identified by the Yale historian of tyranny, Timothy Snyder. The historical determinism Putin exhibits would be laughable if it were not in the mind of a genocidal tyrant.

By letting Putin’s lies go unchallenged, Tucker Carlson was revealed as this generation’s Walter Duranty, The New York Times reporter who covered up Stalin’s deliberate murder-by-starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33. The Times, while never returning Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize, would later acknowledge the “consistent underestimation of Stalin’s brutality” in Duranty’s dispatches from Moscow. At the peak of the Terror Famine, which Ukrainians know as the Holodomor, when people were dying of hunger en masse — over 15,000 per day — Duranty wrote: “To put it brutally, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

My hero and mentor, Patriarch and Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, who spent 18 years in the Soviet Gulag for his refusal to betray the Catholic Church and Ukrainian people, often repeated “What will history eventually say about you?” This is a question for both the journalist and the dictator.

-

Source:
https://catholicreview.org/the-tv-host-and-the-dictator-2-0/

 

I can't but agree with this vivid portrayal of Putin. However, although he might have no real faith and is truly just another materialist believing in his own power, I still consider it a definite possibility, in the light of how the pieces on the board seem to be aligning with Catholic (approved) prophesy, that he is being unwittingly directed by God. In this, God may merely be using him as an instrument of chastisement. If the latter is the case, the West certainly deserves it, although a portion of the Catholic Church that remains among the most faithful and traditional lies in the front-line for the hammer. It is notable that when the Soviets tried to liquidate the Ukrainian Catholic Church, she went underground and later resurrected. This, in my opinion, goes to show that the old-style direct Bolshevik oppression is not nearly as damaging as the softer brain-washing we are experiencing in the West. Nevertheless, we have seen what's happening in South America. Let's hope and pray that when a faithful and traditional Catholic Church rises again from the wreckage left by what seems to be imminent, that in one of many such incidents, the flock will return from their current Pentecostalism to her open arms, as happened in the post-Soviet Ukraine.