Signs of the Times - Part I

This from Spain:

Spain's bishops are alarmed by ambitious plans to recreate the city of Cordoba - once the heart of the ancient Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus - as a pilgrimage site for Muslims throughout Europe.

Plans include the construction of a half-size replica of Cordoba's eighth century great mosque, according to the head of Cordoba's Muslim Association. Funds for the project are being sought from the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and Muslim organisations in Morocco and Egypt.Other big mosques are reportedly planned for Medina Azahara near Cordoba, Seville and Granada.

The bishops of those cities are alarmed at the construction of ostentatious mosques, fearing that the church's waning influence may be further eclipsed by resurgent Islam financed from abroad. Up to one million Muslims are estimated to live in Spain. Many are drawn by a romantic nostalgia for the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, the caliphate that ruled Spain for more than five centuries. ...

Spain's Muslims have been long respectful towards civil and ecclesiastical authorities, but as numbers have grown they have turned to more radical leaders. An alliance of Spanish converts, pro-Moroccan and pro-Saudi leaders took control of one of Spain's two main Islamic federations last year. Half of the new leaders are imams from Saudi-funded mosques in Madrid and Fuengirola. ...

Hundreds of mosques have popped up all over Spain. But churches, and many residents, complain that big, shiny mosques are more than just centres for culture and worship, and say they are funded by undemocratic countries promoting Islamic radicalism.

The whole story is here.

The evidence mounts daily. The Enlightenment dream of the passing away of religion is long dead, and the secular multiculturalist dream into which the Enlightenment illusion conveniently morphed in the face of evidence to the contrary is dying and, in the process, exposing the shame of those who opted for it so cravenly.

If the Christian foundations of Europe are not restored and Europeans, especially young Europeans, made aware of the personal, cultural, and moral value Christian faith, the great-grandchildren of today's breezy secularists (few in number though they will be) will almost certainly be raised in a world more Taliban than tolerant.

Perhaps the secularists who are condemning their own descendants to such a fate can take a little solace in the fact that their descendants will have little access to the real history of the world they inhabit and precious little appreciation for what might have been had their predecessors been less drunk on an empty ideology.