History

Cultural Legacy of Communism: Armenian Women Still Have Average of 8 and as High as 20 Abortions in Lifetime

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When the Berlin Wall fell everyone pondered the ramifications as East Germany rejoined their Western brothers and presumably in a few short years catapult Germany to even higher economic prominence. It didn’t happen. As it turned out, all it takes to weaken a culture is one generation. Sixty years can wipe values and habits that took generations to accrue. Russia proves the same point. Cultural rebuilding is a slower process than we would like, which also compels us to protect the things that remain. If the first things are lost they take a long time to restore, if ever.

In the essay below writer Ben Johnson examines the abortion rates of once Christian Armenia after the call of Communism and reveals that the restoration of human value will be hard fought. Fortunately the Orthodox Church is starting to speak out. Orthodox writer and ethicist Vigen Guroian is quoted:

“I cannot understand why the Armenian people are committing genocide against themselves now, when they’ve endured it.” During the Armenian genocide (1915-1923), 1.5 million of the Ottoman Empire’s 2 million Armenian Christians were exterminated by Muslim Turks.

“What’s even more sad is that the news comes out at this time of the year, at Advent and at the time of the birth of the Lord.”

If the Virgin Mary had been in Armenia at this time, she probably would have been encouraged to have an abortion.”

Source: Lifesite News | Ben Johnson

YEREVAN, ARMENIA, December 20, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The practice of sex-selective abortion has become so deeply ingrained in the former Soviet republic of Armenia – where the median number of abortions obtained by women over 40 is a staggering eight – that the nation will soon face “a deficit of women,” according to a United Nations health official.

A new report produced by the United Nations Population Fund, the Armenian ministry of health, and the Institute of Perinatology found that 7,000 Armenian women – or 0.8 percent of all Armenian women of child-bearing age – had elected to have sex-selective abortions since 2006. Armenia has the world’s second worst ratio of boys-to-girls in the world, second only to China, according to a World Economic Forum report. The average nation has a ratio of 106 boys to 100 girls; Armenia’s average is 112 to 100.

The study, “Prevalence and Reasons of Sex-Selective Abortions in Armenia,” estimated a loss of 1,400 future mothers. UNFPA Armenia Assistant Representative Garik Hayrapetyan told reporters Monday, “In ten to 20 years,” he said,” we will face a deficit of women.”

He was surprised to learn that “highly educated women” with a comfortable salary were the most likely to choose to abort unborn female children.

Dr. Vigen Guroian, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia told LifeSiteNews.com, “I cannot understand why the Armenian people are committing genocide against themselves now, when they’ve endured it.” During the Armenian genocide (1915-1923), 1.5 million of the Ottoman Empire’s 2 million Armenian Christians were exterminated by Muslim Turks.

“What’s even more sad is that the news comes out at this time of the year, at Advent and at the time of the birth of the Lord,” he said.

“If the Virgin Mary had been in Armenia at this time, she probably would have been encouraged to have an abortion.”

Dr. Guroian, who is of Armenian descent, said the debate became personal for him after the birth of his granddaughter five months ago, when he realized she may never have been born in her family’s homeland.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, (PACE) passed a resolution in October stating that aborting unborn girls “reinforces a climate of violence against women,” and the coercion young mothers undergo constitutes “a form of psychological violence.” It particularly highlighted Armenia’s situation. However, the resolution deemed the practice “justified for the prevention of serious sex-linked genetic diseases.” Its author, Doris Stump, instructed, “We should be careful, however, not to use prenatal sex selection as a pretext to limit legal abortion.”

Armenia’s abortion rate, although lower than it was in the 1990s and only one-third the rate of the 1980s, remains staggeringly high. The median number of abortions for women over 40 is eight, and some women have as many as 20 abortions in a lifetime.

Experts attribute this to the lingering influence of the Soviet Union, when abortion became the nation’s primary means of birth control. Similar rates persist in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. “This is now a deeply culturally set pattern. I don’t think the church could solve the problem tomorrow by speaking up,” Dr. Guroian said.

“I’ve voiced my anguish at the church’s reticence to address this in the past,” he said. “Perhaps it had an excuse during the period of Soviet rule, but it’s had no excuse for the past 20 years.”

A spokesperson for the Western Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church of North America declined to comment on this story. Representatives from the Eastern Diocese were not immediately available by deadline.

However, some voices within Armenia have articulated the Christian Church’s opposition to abortion. Fr. Kyuregh Talyan, a parish priest in the Kotayk Diocese, held a press conference last month to say, “A human being begins life from the moment of conception. To me, an emotionless concept like ‘artificial termination of pregnancy’ is nothing more than homicide.” Its widespread tolerance “comes from a new religion prevailing in Europe – the religion of ‘human rights.’”

The conscious decision to abort unborn girls now pervades the globe. The British medical journal The Lancet estimated some 12 million sex-selection abortions had taken place in India from 1980 to 2010. The shortage of women has become so acute it has led to “wife-sharing.” A study of the sex imbalance in India, China, and South Korea links the absence of potential wives to increased aggression, violence, and criminal behavior among men. The Parental Non-Discrimination Act aims to end the practice in the United States.

Armenian legislators have proposed a law forbidding doctors from disclosing the child’s sex until after the cut-off time when abortions are forbidden under law. Like much of Europe, Armenia restricts abortions to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. However, many later abortions take place, often chemical abortions induced at home without a doctor’s supervision.

Yet some within Armenia emphasize the real danger is not “gendercide,” but abortion itself. The head of the Department of Gynecology at the Armenian-American Wellness Center, Dr. Marina Voskanyan, warned, “Women have to know that discontinuing any pregnancy…will lead to serious health issues. An abortion is a very negative phenomenon.”

Dr. Vahe Ter-Minasyan, an ob-gyn in Armenia, agreed: “To opt for an abortion is merely a question of ignorance. If women and their husbands knew how much damage an abortion causes to a woman’s health, they would never choose it.”

WND: Bonhoeffer in Harlem

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When I attended seminary over 20 years ago, one of my favorite activities was the inter-seminary dialogues. Once a month about seven or eight of us would drive down to Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan to meet up with Jewish rabbinical students and seminarians from Union Theological Seminary (Protestant) and St. Joseph’s (Catholic).

You’d think the gathering would spark some lively and substantive debate, but the truth was the contest wasn’t even close. From the very first meeting the Jews and Orthodox left the Protestants and Catholics in the dust.

The participants from Union were caught in the worst sort of theological relativism, so much so that they were uncertain even of first principles. We just got tired of waiting for them to build up enough self-assurance to craft a coherent argument. The Catholics were reeling from the exposure of the sex-abuse scandals that were coming to light at the time and retreated into an obscure Marian piety that we Orthodox could somewhat understand, but was completely incomprehensible to the Protestants and Jews. Only the Orthodox and Jews had something to say.

The personal connection with Union Seminary and that Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent time there fifty years earlier and came to the same conclusions we did makes the essay below so interesting. I never knew Bonhoeffer spent any time at Union, but I know enough about his life and witness that his observations are worth pondering. His reflections foreshadowed the decline of mainline Protestantism that has come to pass in our day.

The author makes some political points some readers won’t like, but just overlook those. There is still a lot of value in the piece.

Source: World Net Daily | Elias Washington

[The Union students] talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria … They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1930

During this Thanksgiving holiday, I am reading a revelatory biography on one of my favorite theologians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. April 9, 1945), who, like millions of his fellow German citizens, would become an involuntary victim of Hitler’s fascist government and Nazi genocide literally weeks before the death of Hitler, the fall of Berlin and the triumph of the Allied Powers on V-E Day (May 8). The book is titled, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy” (2010) by Eric Metaxas.

When Bonhoeffer came to America to do post-graduate studies in theology on a teaching fellowship at New York’s Union Theological Seminary from 1930-31, little did he realize that he was at Ground Zero of an epic war between liberals and fundamentalists, progressives and conservative Christians. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Riverside Church – mere blocks from Union and built specially for him by John D. Rockefeller – was the most famous liberal preacher in America. On the other side, representing traditional faith and described as a fundamentalist, stood Dr. Walter Duncan Buchanan, pastor of Broadway Presbyterian Church, six blocks south of Union and built without this existential Faustian bargain with the devil (or Mr. Rockefeller’s money), thank you.

Bonhoeffer observed that Union was on the side of Fosdick, Rockefeller and Henry Luce, American publisher extraordinaire and founder of Time Magazine, who did a flattering article on Fosdick when Riverside opened in October 1930. Bonhoeffer noted, “In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.”

Bonhoeffer further wrote of the anti-theological mood at Union:

The theological atmosphere of the Union Theological Seminary is accelerating the process of the secularization of Christianity in America. Its criticism is directed essentially against the fundamentalists and to a certain extent also against the radical humanists in Chicago; it is healthy and necessary. But there is no sound basis on which one can rebuild after demolition. It is carried away with the general collapse.

Bonhoeffer realized what I call the “progressive revolution” had all but destroyed real Christianity. The American seminary was not up to his exacting German standards. (“There is no theology here,” Bonhoeffer would write to his superintendent, Max Diestel.) Yet there was a small ray of light that shone brightly through the black hole of liberalism. Metaxas wrote, “The one, notable exception, Bonhoeffer again observed, was in the ‘negro churches.’ If his year in New York had value, it was mainly because of his experiences in the ‘negro churches.'”

While in New York, Bonhoeffer developed a strong friendship with one of his classmates, a black man from Alabama named Albert Franklin “Frank” Fisher, a social worker at the progressive Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem headed by the irrepressible Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. Since Bonhoeffer was weary of the cold, dead liberal sermons in places like Riverside Church, when Fisher invited him to a service at Abyssinian, he gladly attended.

On Bonhoeffer’s experiences in Harlem, Metaxas wrote, “For the first time Bonhoeffer saw the gospel preached and lived out in obedience to God’s commands. He was entirely captivated, and for the rest of his time in New York, he was there every Sunday to worship and to teach a Sunday school class of boys; he was active in a number of groups in the church. …”

It’s amazing how the more things change the more they stay the same. I recently read that professor Cornel West, perhaps the most famous and outspoken black Marxist theologian and progressive “intellectual” will soon leave Princeton for Union Theological Seminary.” I wonder what will professor West teach his impressionable, young students at Union? About the god of Fosdick, Rockefeller, Occupy Wall Street and the socialist media, or about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Darwin or David? St. Marx or St. Matthew? St. Nietzsche (“God is dead”) or St. Paul (“I am crucified with Christ …”)?

Had Bonhoeffer remained in New York for another year, he would have witnessed voting patterns of black Americans tragically shift away from the Republican Party – the party of the abolitionists, of Abraham Lincoln, Henry Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. It was the same party that freed their forefathers from 250 years of slavery to once again put on the slave chains in 1932 where black Americans under the influence of Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, the NAACP and thousands of black pastors like Powell who told their naïve flocks to vote for the Democratic Socialist Party and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs. These were the same progressives who presently kept them segregated in racial concentration camps called ghettos in Harlem, Watts, Southside of Chicago, “Black Bottom” on the Eastside of Detroit and in neighborhoods in big cities and little towns across America in the 1930s – and in 2011.

It was exactly 80 years ago that Dietrich Bonhoeffer completed his teaching fellowship at Union and his unplanned work deconstructing Jim Crow racial segregation laws by openly worshiping with black people at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist church and left New York. Returning to Germany by late June 1931, he began actively plotting against Hitler and Nazism with other courageous Germans. Bonhoeffer would eventually sacrifice his liberty to become a prisoner first at Tegel military camp (“Cell 92,” April 1943) and later at Buchenwald (Feb. 1945) and Flossenbürg (April 1945) concentration camps, where he fulfilled his ultimate destiny as a sainted martyr who willing gave his life courageously fighting against Nazi tyranny and against the madness of Hitler’s Aryan supremacy.

Bonhoeffer transcended our defective human condition and demonstrated his enduring love of God, family and country by sacrificing his own personal safety and security playing a central part in two separate plots to kill Hitler (“Operation Valkyrie” and “Operation 7”) in exchange for Hitler’s merciless revenge, SS torture chambers and eventual martyrdom by hanging at the infamous Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. Why? Bonhoeffer answered in an equally transcendent manner – Silence in the face of evil is itself evil; God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

Church that Held the 7th Ecumenical Council at Nicea to be Turned into Mosque

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Source: Vatican Insider

Hagia Sophia in Nicea, where the Seventh Ecumenical Council was held in 787, is about to be declared a mosque by the Turkish authorities.

As the Turkish press reports, the call to prayer was sung from the Muezzin last Thursday, for the first time since the founding of the Turkish Republish in 1923. The minaret was added to the church in the city that the Turks called “Iznik” in the Ottoman age. Last year it was restored. With the prayer to be said at the beginning of the Islamic feast of sacrifice on Sunday morning, the former church will be ready for Islamic religious ceremonies.

The decision by the office of the Administrative Council, the competent authority, has sparked fierce debate. Selcuk Mülayim, of the University of Marmara, an art historian, underlined the building’s importance in the history of Christianity and warned that the move would mark the beginning of protests from all over the world.

Iznik’s chamber of commerce criticized the move as lacking any sense, since the small city lives off tourism. Equally controversial is the issue of whether it is the Council’s duty to explain how the former church was changed from a museum into a mosque. The office explained that the building had been marked out by the community “unjustifiably” as a museum, since it had never been used as a museum before. Last year, a sign was posted in front of the restored church building, with “Museum” written on it; a guard made visitors pay for an admission ticket.

In Hagia Sophia, the bishops of the Roman empire gathered in 787 to decide over the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy, and to approve the veneration of icons. Nicea was also the meeting place of the First Ecumenical Council, in the year 325. The palace where the Council took place no longer exists. Hagia Sophia was transformed into a mosque by the Muslims in 1331, when they conquered the city.

After a fire, it was restored by the architect Mimar; it was later destroyed in the battle of Bursa in the Turkish war of independence in 1920. The ruins were restored in 2007 and have attracted Christian religious tourism.

With the Rise of Militant Secularism, Rome and Moscow Make Common Cause

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Met. Kyrill (before becoming Patriarch) and Pope Benedict

The Acton Institute just published my essay.

Source: Acton Institute | Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

The European religious press is abuzz over recent developments in Orthodox – Catholic relations that indicate both Churches are moving closer together. The diplomatic centerpiece of the activity would be a meeting of Pope Benedict and Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church that was first proposed by Pope John Paul II but never realized. Some look to a meeting in 2013 which would mark the 1,700th anniversary of the signing of the Edict of Milan when Constantine lifted the persecution of Christians. It would be the first visit between the Pope of Rome and Patriarch of Moscow in history.

A few short years ago a visit between Pope and Patriarch seemed impossible because of lingering problems between the two Churches as they reasserted territorial claims and began the revival of the faith in post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. The relationship grew tense at times and while far from resolved, a spirit of deepening cooperation has nevertheless emerged. Both Benedict and Kyrill share the conviction that European culture must rediscover its Christian roots to turn back the secularism that threatens moral collapse.

Both men draw from a common moral history: Benedict witnessed the barbarism of Nazi Germany and Kyrill the decades long communist campaign to destroy all religious faith. It informs the central precept in their public ministry that all social policy be predicated on the recognition that every person has inherent dignity and rights bestowed by God, and that the philosophical materialism that grounds modern secularism will subsume the individual into either ideology or the state just as Nazism and Communism did. If Europe continues its secular drift, it is in danger of repeating the barbarism of the last century or of yielding to Islam.

The deepening relationship does not portend a union between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Roman Catholics are more optimistic about unity because they are less aware of the historical animus that exists between Catholics and Orthodox. Nevertheless, while the increasing cooperation shows the gravity of the threat posed by secularism, it also indicates that the sensitive historical exigencies can be addressed in appropriate ways and times and will not derail the more pressing mission.

The cooperation has also caused the Churches to examine assumptions of their own that may prove beneficial in the long run. The meaning of papal supremacy tops the list.

On the Orthodox side the claims to a universal jurisdictional supremacy of the Patriarch of Rome have been rejected since (indeed, was a cause of) the Great Schism of 1054 (see here and here). That said, the Orthodox see the Pope of Rome as the rightful Patriarch of the Church of Rome and could afford him a primacy of honor in a joint council but not jurisdiction.

On the other side, the Orthodox do not have a Magisterium, a centralized Church structure that speaks for all the Orthodox in the world. This has led to some fractious internal wrangling throughout the centuries although doctrine and teaching has remained remarkably consistent.

It will come as no surprise for anyone to know that the Orthodox have difficulties with some of the claims made by the Catholic Church concerning the precise responsibilities and the nature of the authority associated with the Bishop of Rome. The Catholic Church has long recognized this as a basic difference between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds. The rise of militant secularism, however, and the cultural challenges this creates for Orthodox and Catholic Christians alike, have focused everyone’s minds on how they can cooperate to address these issues of ethics and culture.

Protestants have a stake in the outcome as well particularly as attitudes have softened towards Rome due in large part to Pope John Paul II’s exemplary leadership during the collapse of communism in the last century. Protestant ecclesiology has no real place for priest or pope which makes the nature of discussions between them and the Catholics or Orthodox entirely different. Nevertheless, as the soul denying ramifications of secularism become more evident, an increasing number look to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches for leadership.

The most visible ambassador for the Orthodox Church is Oxford-educated Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev of Volokomansk who runs the Department of External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church. Observers report that a deep respect and even genuine fondness exists between Hilarion and Benedict which has contributed to the recent thaw.

Both of them note with alarm the increasing attacks on the Christian faith in Europe and on Christians themselves in other parts of the world, a development they term “Christophobia.” Hilarion brought these points forward several years back when he first challenged the European Union for omitting any mention of the Christian roots of European civilization in the EU Constitution. That earned him considerable worldwide notice and he has become increasingly outspoken towards any attempts to silence the Christian testimony or dim the historical memory of Christendom.

From the Orthodox side it is clear that the leadership that deals with the concrete issues that affect the decline of the Christian West is emerging from Moscow. One reason is the sheer size of the renewed Russian Orthodox Church. The deeper reason however, is that the Russians have direct experience with the suffering and death that ensues when the light of the Christian faith is vanquished from culture.

Decades before the fall of Communism was even a conceptual possibility for most people, Pope John Paul II prophesied that the regeneration of Europe would come from Russia. At the time many people thought it was the misguided ramblings of a misguided man. It is looking like he knew more than his critics. We are fortunate to have these two leaders, Benedict and Kyrill, to help guide us through the coming difficulties.

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse is an Orthodox priest in the Antiochian Archdiocese of North and South America. He is president of the American Orthodox Institute and serves on the board of the Institute for Religion and Democracy. He writes frequently on social and cultural issues on his blog and elsewhere.