Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn giving “the Templeton Address”
Orthodox Christian author, and Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. On 10th May 1983, at the ceremony for winning the Templeton Prize, he gave an acceptance speech under the title “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag” (that became known as “The Templeton Address”) and was a stirring description of prophetic warnings to the West of the dire consequences that would follow the abandonment of its Christian traditions and heritage. Those like Solzheinitsyn, who had witnessed first-hand the atrocities and terror of communism, understood fully why such evil takes root, how it grows and deceives, and the kind of hell it will ultimately unleash on the innocent and the faithful. Godlessness is always the first step towards tyranny and oppression!
Did the Blessed Virgin Mary not also warn us through the little seers at Fatima in 1917 of the consequences to Mankind if we were to continue to turn away from God?
Regarding atheism, Solzhenitsyn declared:
“More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: MEN HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD.
The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.”
The parallels Solzheinitsyn spoke of in 1983, with the current crisis and moral decay in western society today, are striking and frightening. Read the full “Templeton Address” here.
Update: Blessed Cardinal John Newman (1801-1890): “How can we answer to ourselves for the souls who have in our times lived and died in sin; the souls that have been lost and are now waiting for the judgment, seeing that for what we know, we were ordained to influence or reverse their present destiny and have not done it?”
Catholicism Pure & Simple 
“Godlessness is always the first step towards tyranny and oppression!”
Not so. Certainly not “always”
Many nations in history have practised tyranny and oppression in the name of God.
We can start with the Egyptians in the bible, and come up to date with ISIS.
In between, the blacks in South Africa suffered tyranny and oppression based on the bible.
There are many more examples, as we know. What about the Roman Empire?
Saudi Arabia is probably the most horrible place on earth. Lots of God. Wrong variety, some might say, but still God.
But, yes, all totalitarian regimes are Hell.
Whether based on politics left or right – or religion, Muslim, Christian, or Hindu or whatever.
Tolerance and plurality is what we need – and plenty of both. We can all agree on that.
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…But I’ve been thinking hard about all this, and I will readily agree that the vast majority of people killed by other people, billions probably – have been murdered in such causes as politics, race, territory, economics, colonialism and tribalism.
And only maybe a few millions for solely religious reasons.
So few, you’d hardly notice.
Hardly worth bringing up, really.
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From my reading of writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I have always had the impression that most of the ordinary people of Tsarist Russia were pious and God-fearing.
I have no way of knowing if that was in fact true, but if it was, and if THEY had to suffer because they had “forgotten God,” then you really have to wonder what the future holds for the present “developed” world of America and Europe and elsewhere.
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Very good point, RJB.
Also true they already suffered tyranny and oppression on a grand scale.
Out of which came yet more tyranny and oppression.
Was the original dose “Godless” ? I don’t know.
Maybe it’s that God has forgotten us? Nietzsche thought something like that.
I don’t know that, either.
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@ 000rjbennett
Yes Robert, it was indeed a tragedy of gigantic proportions – that ‘Holy Russia’, as it had been known, had the Faith torn from it so brutally and (almost) entirely in the decades following the Russian Revolution. By the time Alexander Solzheinitsyn gave the “Templeton Address” in 1983 on how ‘men had forgotten God’, Russia had become a totalitarian communist nation with only a few people alive who could still remember any type of Christian education or practice. The atheistic brain-washing was so virulent that even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent slackening against religious practice once again, the scars of the wounds inflicted by the implacable systematic and radical atheist propaganda ran deep.
There is now freedom of religion, but as you point out, people behind the once-called Iron Curtain who were deprived of their Faith for 70 years, now also have to tackle the problems of western indifference, secularism and materialism that are being introduced there!
So much for our “freedom of religion” in the West!
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