Breitbart | 061318
The Catholic Church in New York has inaugurated the first Shrine in the world dedicated to prayer for persecuted Christians, with the blessing of the icon of Our Lady of Aradin, “Mother of the Persecuted Church,” at St. Michael’s parish Wednesday.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, said he hopes the shrine will be a place “to pray for all the displaced Christians of the Middle East,” and for the whole world.
“We are at a Lepanto moment in Western history,” said Father Benedict Kiely, founder of Nasarean.org, an organization dedicated to assisting “Christians suffering under the persecution of militant Islam throughout the world” and particularly in the Middle East.
Lepanto refers to the 1571 naval battle that turned the tide for Christian forces resisting the onslaught of the Muslim invaders of the Ottoman Empire in the waters off southwestern Greece.
“We must pray with the same fervor that the Christians prayed then to save Western civilization, not just from the danger of radical Islamist extremism, but from radical, aggressive secular liberalism,” Father Kiely told Breitbart News.
