Professor Massimo Introvigne: U.S. may be on path toward anti-Christian violence

Professor Massimo Introvigne, Chairman of the newly created Observatory on Religious Liberty, a joint-creation of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the City of Rome, the purpose of which is to monitor religious freedom around the world, has expressed his concern that the United States is on the path to anti-Christian violence.

As reported by the Catholic News Agency here, "The inaugural meeting was held at Rome’s Foreign Press Association June 28. It heard Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore make the case that religious liberty in the United States is currently imperiled by the prevailing culture as well as by legislation such as the recent Department of Health & Human Services mandate.


Introvigne stressed that he did not want to create a 'false impression' that he was equating 'the bloody persecution of Christians' as presently occurs in some African and Asian countries with 'discriminatory legislation in the United States or Europe.'

However, the 57-year-old sociologist suggested that there was a 'three stage process' which could lead to anti-Christian violence in the West if action to protect religious liberty was not taken.

'It starts with intolerance which is a cultural phenomenon,' he explained 'and then if intolerance becomes so widespread and popular, some politicians will act upon it and introduce discriminatory legislation.'

It is in this 'climate of discrimination,' he said, that people can decide to take the law into their own hands and use violence to further suppress Christianity."

This isn't news to readers of this Blog.  For many years I have been issuing the same warning.  As I noted here:

Professor James Hitchcock, in his excellent work entitled 'Catholicism and Modernity' (New York:Seabury Press, 1979, p. 86), explains the role of the media in this entire process: "The media's alleged commitment to 'pluralism' is at base a kind of hoax. The banner of pluralism is raised in order to win toleration for new ideas as yet unacceptable to the majority. Once toleration has been achieved, public opinion is systematically manipulated first to enforce a status of equality between the old and the new, then to assert the superiority of the new over the old. A final stage is often the total discrediting, even sometimes the banning, of what had previously been orthodox."


This is the path Barack Obama and his secular socialist machine have put us on.  And the HHS Mandate is merely the beginning of a process which will lead to oppression and physical violence.  It was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas who warned of the way in which oppression can subtly arise in our midst: "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.  In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."