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“Our Father”

February 19, 2017

Yesterday, Melania Trump gave a short speech to a crowd of supporters of her husband, President Donald Trump, by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

That was an extraordinary and important act that we need to understand in the context of what has happened to society and culture in America and Western Europe.

I was fortunate in 1987 to be working for the President of Germany’s Catholic University, a public institution in a country that supports religion with direct subsidies. “Separation of Church and State” is not  practiced, religion is celebrated in public ways not experienced in the United States, all the while culture in Western Europe sheds its Christian heritage.

One  of my duties back then was to travel to some of the soon to be liberated countries of Eastern Europe where I encountered a vibrant expression of Christian faith. I concluded that the farther we went away from the centers of the West the greater was the expression of Christian faith.

One of my good friends, former Cong. Bob Shaffer has had an abiding desire to become Ambassador to Ukraine because his mother was Ukrainian. Bob once observed how impressed he was by the religious life of the Ukrainian people. I too had experienced that and Melania Trump’s pious act brought all of that home to me.

Many years ago when I was a child attending a Lutheran parish school, my days began with the Lord’s prayer, songs of praise and later in the day those acts were repeated in what we called “Matins.” Only when I went to public school and university did I realize how precious were those days and how important was  the Lord’s Prayer to my daily life.

That is the meaning of Melania’s pious recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at a political rally in Melbourne, Florida on Saturday, February 19.  Follow the commentary on that act in order to better understand how far we in America have travelled away from the Christian roots of our culture.

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