Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was a war fought in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. One of the most destructive conflicts in human history, it resulted in eight million fatalities not only from military engagements but from violence and plague. Casualties were overwhelmingly and disproportionately inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire, most of the rest being battle deaths from various foreign armies. In terms of proportional German casualties and destruction, it was surpassed only by the period January to May 1945. A war between various Protestant and Catholic states in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire, it developed into a more general conflict involving most of the European great powers; these states employed large mercenary armies, the war became less about religion and more of a continuation of the France–Habsburg rivalry for European political pre-eminence. The war was preceded by the election of the new Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, who tried to impose religious uniformity on his domains, forcing Roman Catholicism on its peoples.
The northern Protestant states, angered by the violation of their rights to choose, granted in the Peace of Augsburg, banded together to form the Protestant Union. Ferdinand II was a devout Roman Catholic and much more intolerant than his predecessor, Rudolf II, who ruled from the Protestant city of Prague. Ferdinand's policies were considered pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant; these events caused widespread fears throughout northern and central Europe, triggered the Protestant Bohemians living in the relatively loose dominion of Habsburg Austria to revolt against their nominal ruler, Ferdinand II. After the so-called Defenestration of Prague deposed the Emperor's representatives in Prague, the Protestant estates and Catholic Habsburgs started gathering allies for war; the Protestant Bohemians ousted the Habsburgs and elected the Calvinist Frederick V, Elector of the Rhenish Palatinate as the new king of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Frederick took the offer without the support of the Protestant Union.
The southern states Roman Catholic, were angered by this. Led by Bavaria, these states formed the Catholic League to expel Frederick in support of the Emperor; the Empire soon crushed the perceived Protestant rebellion in the Battle of White Mountain, executing leading Bohemian aristocrats shortly after. Protestant rulers across Europe unanimously condemned the Emperor's action. After the atrocities committed in Bohemia, Saxony gave its support to the Protestant Union and decided to fight back. Sweden, at the time a rising military power, soon intervened in 1630 under its king Gustavus Adolphus, transforming what had been the Emperor's attempt to curb the Protestant states into a full-scale war in Europe. Habsburg Spain, wishing to crush the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, intervened under the pretext of helping its dynastic Habsburg ally, Austria. No longer able to tolerate the encirclement of two major Habsburg powers on its borders, Catholic France entered the coalition on the side of the Protestants in order to counter the Habsburgs.
The Thirty Years' War devastated entire regions, resulting in high mortality among the populations of the German and Italian states, the Crown of Bohemia, the Southern Netherlands. Both mercenaries and soldiers in fighting armies traditionally looted or extorted tribute to get operating funds, which imposed severe hardships on the inhabitants of occupied territories; the war bankrupted most of the combatant powers. The Dutch Republic enjoyed contrasting fortune; the Thirty Years' War ended with the Treaty of Osnabrück and the Treaties of Münster, part of the wider Peace of Westphalia. The war altered the previous political order of European powers; the rise of Bourbon France, the curtailing of Habsburg ambition, the ascendancy of Sweden as a great power created a new balance of power on the continent, with France emerging from the war strengthened and dominant in the latter part of the 17th century. The Peace of Augsburg, signed by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, confirmed the result of the Diet of Speyer, ending the war between German Lutherans and Catholics, establishing that: Rulers of the 224 German states could choose the religion of their realms.
Subjects had to follow that emigrate. Prince-bishoprics and other states ruled by Catholic clergy were excluded and should remain Catholic. Prince-bishops who converted to Lutheranism were required to give up their territories. Lutherans could keep the territory they had taken from the Catholic Church since the Peace of Passau in 1552. Although the Peace of Augsburg created a temporary end to hostilities, it did not resolve the underlying religious conflict, made yet more complex by the spread of Calvinism throughout Germany in the years that followed; this added a third major faith to the region, but its position was not recognized in any way by the Augsburg terms, to which only Catholicism and Lutheranism were parties. The rulers of the nations neighboring the Holy Roman Empir
Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution
The dechristianization of France during the French Revolution is a conventional description of the results of a number of separate policies conducted by various governments of France between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Concordat of 1801, forming the basis of the and less radical laïcité policies. The goal of the campaign between 1793 and 1794 ranged from the public reclamation of the massive amounts of land and money held by the Catholic Church in France to the termination of Catholic religious practice and of the religion itself. There has been much scholarly debate over; the French Revolution began with attacks on church corruption and the wealth of the higher clergy, an action with which many Christians could identify, since the Roman Catholic church held a dominant role in pre-revolutionary France. During a two-year period known as the Reign of Terror, the episodes of anti-clericalism grew more violent than any in modern European history; the new revolutionary authorities suppressed the church.
In October 1793 the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoning from the date of the Revolution, Festivals of Liberty and the Supreme Being were scheduled. New forms of moral religion emerged, including the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being and the atheistic Cult of Reason, with the revolutionary government mandating observance of the former in April 1794. In 18th-century France, the vast majority of the population adhered to the Catholic Church as Catholicism had been since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the only religion allowed in the kingdom. Nonetheless, minorities of French Protestants and Jews still lived in France at the beginning of the Revolution; the Edict of Versailles known as the Edict of Tolerance, had been signed by Louis XVI on 7 November 1787 and had given non-Catholics in France the right to practice their religions as well as legal and civil status, which included the right to contract marriages without having to convert to the Catholic faith. At the same time, libertine thinkers popularized anti-clericalism.
The Ancien Régime institutionalised the authority of the clergy in its status as the First Estate of the realm. As the largest landowner in the country, the Catholic Church controlled properties which provided massive revenues from its tenants. Since the Church kept the registry of births and marriages and was the only institution that provided hospitals and education in some parts of the country, it influenced all citizens. A milestone event of the Revolution was the abolition of the privileges of the First and Second Estate on the night of 4 August 1789. In particular, it abolished; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 proclaimed freedom of religion across France in these terms: Article IV - Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law. Article X - No one may be disturbed for his opinions religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.
On October 10, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly seized the properties and land held by the Catholic Church and decided to sell them as assignats. On July 12, 1790, the assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that subordinated the Roman Catholic Church in France to the French government, it was never accepted by the Pope and other high-ranking clergy in Rome. The programme of dechristianization waged against Catholicism, against all forms of Christianity, included: destruction of statues and other iconography from places of worship destruction of crosses and other external signs of worship the institution of revolutionary and civic cults, including the Cult of Reason and subsequently the Cult of the Supreme Being the enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 making all nonjuring priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight An notable event that took place in the course of France’s dechristianization was the Festival of Reason, held in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November 1793.
The dechristianization campaign can be seen as the logical extension of the materialist philosophies of some leaders of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, while for others with more prosaic concerns it provided an opportunity to unleash resentments against the Catholic Church and its clergy. In August 1789, the State cancelled the taxing power of the Church; the issue of church property became central to the policies of the new revolutionary government. Declaring that all church property in France belonged to the nation, confiscations were ordered and church properties were sold at public auction. In July 1790, the National Constituent Assembly published the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that stripped clerics of their special rights — the clergy were to be made employees of the state, elected by their parish or bishopric, the number of bishoprics was to be reduced — and required all priests and bishops to swear an oath of fidelity to the new order or face dismissal, deportation or death.
French priests had to receive Papal approval to sign such an oath, Pius VI spent eight months deliberating on the issue. On 13 April 1791, the Pope denounced th
Persecution of Christians
The persecution of Christians can be traced from the first century of the Christian era to the present day. Early Christians were persecuted for their faith at the hands of both the Jews from whose religion Christianity arose and the Romans who controlled many of the lands across which early Christianity was spread. Early in the fourth century, a form of the religion was legalized by the Edict of Milan, it became the State church of the Roman Empire. Christian missionaries as well as converts to Christianity have been the target of persecution since the emergence of Christianity, sometimes to the point of being martyred for their faith; the schisms of the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation, sometimes provoked severe conflicts between Christian denominations to the point of persecuting each other. In the 20th century, Christians were persecuted by various governments including the Islamic Ottoman Empire in the form of the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide and the Greek Genocide, as well as by atheistic states such as the Soviet Union and North Korea.
Early Christianity began as a sect among Second Temple Jews, according to the New Testament account, including Paul of Tarsus prior to his conversion to Christianity, persecuted early Christians. The early Christians preached the second coming of a Messiah which did not conform to their religious teachings. However, feeling that their beliefs were supported by Jewish scripture, Christians had been hopeful that their countrymen would accept their faith. Despite individual conversions, the vast majority of Judean Jews did not become Christians. Claudia Setzer asserts that, "Jews did not see Christians as separate from their own community until at least the middle of the second century." Thus, acts of Jewish persecution of Christians fall within the boundaries of synagogue discipline and were so perceived by Jews acting and thinking as the established community. The Christians, on the other hand, saw themselves as persecuted rather than "disciplined." Inter-communal dissension began immediately with the teachings of Stephen at Jerusalem, considered an apostate.
According to the Acts of the Apostles, a year after the Crucifixion of Jesus, Stephen was stoned for his alleged transgression of the faith, with Saul looking on. In 41 AD, when Agrippa I, who possessed the territory of Antipas and Phillip, obtained the title of King of the Jews, in a sense re-forming the Kingdom of Herod, he was eager to endear himself to his Jewish subjects and continued the persecution in which James the Greater lost his life, Peter narrowly escaped and the rest of the apostles took flight. After Agrippa's death, the Roman procuratorship began and those leaders maintained a neutral peace, until the procurator Festus died and the high priest Annas II took advantage of the power vacuum to attack the Church and executed James the Just leader of Jerusalem's Christians; the New Testament states that Paul was himself imprisoned on several occasions by Roman authorities, stoned by Pharisees and left for dead on one occasion, was taken as a prisoner to Rome. Peter and other early Christians were imprisoned and harassed.
The great Jewish revolt, spurred by the Roman killing of 3,000 Jews, led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the end of Second Temple Judaism, the disempowering of the Jewish persecutors. According to an old church tradition, doubted by historians, the early Christian community had fled Jerusalem beforehand, to the pacified region of Pella. Luke T. Johnson nuances the harsh portrayal of the Jews in the Gospels by contextualizing the polemics within the rhetoric of contemporaneous philosophical debate, showing how rival schools of thought insulted and slandered their opponents; these attacks were formulaic and stereotyped, crafted to define, the enemy in the debates, but not used with the expectation that their insults and accusations would be taken as they would be centuries resulting in millennia of Christian antisemitism. By the 4th century, John Chrysostom argued that the Pharisees alone, not the Romans, were responsible for the murder of Jesus. However, according to Walter Laqueur, "Absolving Pilate from guilt may have been connected with the missionary activities of early Christianity in Rome and the desire not to antagonize those they want to convert."
The first documented case of imperially supervised persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire begins with Nero. In 64 AD, a great fire broke out in Rome, destroying portions of the city and economically devastating the Roman population; some people suspected that Nero himself was the arsonist, as Suetonius reported, claiming that he played the lyre and sang the'Sack of Ilium' during the fires. In his Annals, stated that "to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace". Suetonius to the period, does not mention any persecution after the fire, but in a previous paragraph unrelated to the fire, mentions punishments inflicted on Christians, defined as men following a new and malefic superstition. Suetonius, does not specify the reasons for the punishment, he just lists the fact together with other abuses put down by Nero. In the first two centuries Christianity was a small sect, not a significant concern of the Emperor.
The Church was not in a struggle for i
European wars of religion
The European wars of religion were a series of religious wars waged in Europe in the 16th, 17th and early 18th century. The wars were fought after the Protestant Reformation's beginning in 1517, which disrupted the religious and political order in the Catholic countries of Europe. However, religion was not the only cause of the wars, which included revolts, territorial ambitions, Great Power conflicts. For example, by the end of the Thirty Years' War, Catholic France was allied with the Protestant forces against the Catholic Habsburg monarchy; the wars were ended by the Peace of Westphalia, establishing a new political order, now known as Westphalian sovereignty. However, religion-based armed conflict persisted in Europe, such as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms on the British Isles and the Savoyard–Waldensian wars and Toggenburg War in the Western Alps, until the 1710s; the conflicts began with the minor Knights' Revolt, followed by the larger German Peasants' War in the Holy Roman Empire. Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation in 1545 against the growth of Protestantism.
The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Germany and killed one-third of its population. The Peace of Westphalia put an end to the war by recognising three separate Christian traditions in the Holy Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism and Calvinism. Although many European leaders were'sickened' by the bloodshed by 1648, religious wars continued to be waged in the post-Westphalian period until the 1710s, collective memory of the wars lasted longer; the European wars of religion are known as the Wars of the Reformation. In 1517, Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses took only two months to spread throughout Europe with the help of the printing press, overwhelming the abilities of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the papacy to contain it. In 1521, Luther was excommunicated, sealing the schism within Western Christendom between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutherans and opening the door for other Protestants to resist the power of the papacy. Although most of the wars ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, religious conflicts continued to be fought in Europe until at least the 1710s.
These included the Savoyard–Waldensian wars, the Nine Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession. Whether these should be included in the European wars of religion depends on how one defines a'war of religion', whether these wars can be considered'European'; the religious nature of the wars has been debated, contrasted with other factors at play, such as national and financial interests. Scholars have pointed out that some European wars of this period had no religious elements at all, such as the Italian Wars and the Northern Seven Years' War. Others emphasise the fact that cross-religious alliances existed, such as the Lutheran duke Maurice of Saxony assisting the Catholic emperor Charles V in the first Schmalkaldic War in 1547 in order to become the Saxon elector instead of John Frederick, his Lutheran cousin, while the Catholic king Henry II of France supported the Lutheran cause in the Second Schmalkaldic War in 1552 to secure French bases in modern-day Lorraine; the Encyclopædia Britannica maintains that " wars of religion of this period fought for confessional security and political gain".
Individual conflicts that may be distinguished within this topic include: Pre-Reformation wars: The Hussite Wars in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown Conflicts connected with the Reformation of the 1520s to 1540s: The Knights' Revolt in the Holy Roman Empire The German Peasants' War in the Holy Roman Empire The Wars of Kappel in the Old Swiss Confederacy The Tudor conquest of Ireland on the Catholic population of Ireland by the Tudor kings of England and their Protestant allies The Kildare Rebellion The First Desmond Rebellion The Second Desmond Rebellion The Nine Years' War The Münster rebellion in the Prince-Bishopric of Münster The Count's Feud in the Kalmar Union The Anabaptist riot in Amsterdam Bigod's rebellion in England The Schmalkaldic War in the Holy Roman Empire The Prayer Book Rebellion in England The Second Schmalkaldic War or Princes' Revolt The French Wars of Religion in France The Eighty Years' War in the Low Countries The Cologne War in the Electorate of Cologne The Strasbourg Bishops' War in the Prince-Bishopric of Strasbourg The War against Sigismund in the Polish–Swedish union The War of the Jülich Succession in the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg The Thirty Years' War, affecting the Holy Roman Empire including Habsburg Austria and Bohemia and Moravia, France and SwedenBohemian Revolt between the Protestant nobility of the Bohemian Crown and their Catholic Habsburg king.
This revolt started the Thirty Years' War, causing additional conflicts elsewhere in Europe, subsuming other ongoing conflicts. Hessian War between the Lutheran Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt and the Calvinist Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel The Huguenot rebellions in France The
Red Terror (Spain)
The Red Terror in Spain is the name given by some historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War "by sections of nearly all the leftist groups". News of the rightist military coup in 1936 unleashed a social revolutionary response, no republican region escaped revolutionary and anticlerical violence, but it was minimal in the Basque Country; the violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people as well as attacks on landowners and politicians as well as the desecration and burning of monasteries and churches. A process of political polarisation had characterised the Spanish Second Republic, party divisions became embittered and questions of religious identity came to assume a major political significance. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the right, which had set itself against social reform; the failed pronunciamiento of 1936 set loose a violent onslaught on those that revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies.
In recent years, the Catholic Church has beatified hundreds of the victims, 498 of them on 28 October 2007 in a spectacular ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in its history. Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000 to ~172,344 lives. Paul Preston, speaking in 2012 at the time of the publication of his book The Spanish Holocaust, put the figure at a little under 50,000. Historian Julio de la Cueva wrote that "despite the fact that the Church... suffer appalling persecution", the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists". Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, pointing out that it was the coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish: "its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution". Others see the persecution and violence as predating the coup and found in what they see as a "radical and antidemocratic" anticlericalism of the Republic and its constitution, with the dissolution of the Jesuits in 1932, the nationalisation of all church property in 1933, the prohibition of teaching religion in schools, the prohibition of teaching by clergy and the violent persecution beginning in 1934 in Asturias, with the murder of 37 priests and seminarians and the burning of 58 churches.
The revolution of 1931 that established the Second Republic and the Spanish Constitution of 1931 brought to power an anticlerical government. The relationship between the new, secular Republic and the Catholic Church was fraught from the start. Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, the primate of Spain, urged Catholics to vote in future elections against an administration that wanted to destroy religion; those who sought to lead the'ordinary faithful' had insisted that Catholics had only one political choice, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right: "Voting for the CEDA was presented as a simple duty. The constitution respected civil liberties and representation, but placed restrictions on the church's use of its property and prohibited religious orders from engaging in education; the controversial Articles 26 and 27 of the constitution controlled Church property and prohibited religious orders from engaging in education. Advocates of church/state separation saw the constitution as hostile.
In 1933, Pope Pius XI condemned the Spanish Government's deprivation of the civil liberties of Catholics in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis. Historian Vicente Carcel Orti asserts that anticlerical Freemasons played a large part in the anti-Catholic acts of the government since they held key government positions, including at least 183 deputies in the Cortes and so they were instrumental in the making of anti-Catholic laws; as early as March 1933, Abilia Arroyo de Roman had declared at a rally in the Salamancan pueblo of Macotera that Spain was governed by Masonic lodges, intent on'decatholicizing' Spain, the Gaceta Regional blamed the Law of Congregations on'an occult power' that had taken refuge in Spain'to carry out its experiments'. Since the left considered reform of the anticlerical aspects of the constitution unacceptable, Historian Stanley Payne believed "the Republic as a democratic constitutional regime was doomed from the outset", it has been posited that such a "hostile" approach to the issues of church and state was a substantial cause of the breakdown of democracy and the onset of civil war.
One legal commentator has stated plainly "the gravest mistake of the Constitution of 1931—Spain's last democratic Constitution prior to 1978—was its hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church". The historian Mary Vincent, in her study of the Church in Salamanca in the 1930s, believes the Republican legislation, in affecting the devotional lives of ordinary Catholics, "greatly eased the task of its opponents". Following the general election of February 16, 1936, political bitterness grew in Spain. Violence between the government and its supporters, the Popular Front, whose leadership was c
Conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques
The conversion of non-Islamic places of worship into mosques occurred during the life of prophet Muhammad and continued during subsequent Islamic conquests and under historical Muslim rule. Indigenous population of many subcontinents or regions converted to Islam; as a result, numerous Hindu temples, synagogues, the Parthenon and Zoroastrian temples were converted into mosques. Several such mosques in Muslim or former Muslim lands have since reverted or become museums, such as the Hagia Sophia in Turkey and numerous mosques in Spain. Before the rise of Islam the Ka'aba, Mecca, were revered as a sacred sanctuary and was a site of pilgrimage; some identify it with the Biblical "valley of Baca" from Psalms 84. At the time of Muhammad, his tribe the Quraysh was in charge of the Kaaba, at that time a shrine containing hundreds of idols representing Arabian tribal gods and other religious figures. Muhammad earned the enmity of his tribe by claiming the shrine for the new religion of Islam that he preached.
He wanted the Kaaba to be dedicated to the worship of the one God alone, all the idols were evicted. The Black Stone, still present at the Kaaba was a special object of veneration at the site. According to tradition the text of seven honoured poems were suspended around the Ka'aba. According to Islam, Muhammad's actions were not a conversion but rather a restoration of the mosque established on that site by Abraham, considered to be a prophet in Islam; the Ka'aba thus became known as Sacred Mosque, the holiest site in Islam. Mosques were established on the places of Jewish or Christian sanctuaries associated with Biblical personalities who were recognized by Islam; the Caliph Umar built a small prayer house, which laid the foundation for the construction of the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, the most sacred site in Judaism by the Umayyads. The Dome of the Rock was built on the Temple Mount, an abandoned and disused area. Upon the capture of Jerusalem, it is reported that Umar refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for fear that Muslims would convert it into a mosque in spite of a treaty guaranteeing its safety.
The mosque of Job in Al-Shaykh Saad, was a church of Job. The Herodian shrine of the Cave of the Patriarchs, the second most holy site in Judaism, was converted into a church during the Crusades before being turned into a mosque in 1266 and henceforth banned to Jews and Christians. Part of it was restored as a synagogue after 1967 by Israel; the destruction of Hindu temples in India during the Islamic conquest of India occurred from the beginning of Muslim conquest until the end the Mughal Empire throughout the Indian subcontinent. In his book "Hindu Temples - What Happened to Them", Sita Ram Goel claimed to have produced a list of 2000 mosques that he alleges were built on Hindu temples; the second volume of the book excerpts from medieval histories and chronicles and from inscriptions concerning the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist temples. In Indonesia, where popular conversion from Hinduism to Islam was slower, it is believed that the minaret of the Menara Kudus Mosque, in Java, was part of a Hindu temple according to Goel.
One of Indonesia's most famous mosques, Menara Kudus has retained much of its former Hindu character. Ram Janmabhoomi refers to a tract of land in the North Indian city of Ayodhya, claimed to be the birthplace of Lord Rama; the Archaeological Survey of India, after conducting excavations at the site, filed a report which stated that a temple stood at the site before the arrival of the Mughals, who constructed the Babri Masjid at the site. Critics of the report state that the "presence of animal bones throughout as well as of the use of'surkhi' and lime mortar", found by ASI are all characteristic of Muslim presence, which they claim "rule out the possibility of a Hindu temple having been there beneath the mosque". From 1528 to 1992 this was the site of the Babri Mosque; the mosque was constructed in 1527 on the orders of Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, was named after him. Before the 1940s, the mosque was called Masjid-i-Janmasthan, translation:; the Babri Mosque was one of the largest mosques in Uttar Pradesh, a state in India with some 31 million Muslims.
Numerous petitions by Hindus to the courts resulted in Hindu worshippers of Rama gaining access to the site. The mosque was razed on 6 December 1992 by a mob of some 150,000 Hindus supported by the Hindu organisation as per USA records Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, after a political rally developed into a riot despite a commitment to the Indian Supreme Court by the rally organisers that the mosque would not be harmed; the Sangh Parivaar, along with VHP and the Bhartiya Janta Party, sought to erect a temple dedicated to Rama at this site. The 1986 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica stated that "Rama's birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babar in 1528 on the site claimed of an earlier temple". Archaeological excavations at the site by the Archaeological Survey of India reported the existence of a 10th-century temple; the report stated that scientific dating indicated human activity at the site as far back to the 17th century BC. On 30 September 2010, Allahabad High Court ruled that the 2.7 acres disputed land in Ayodhya, on which the Babri Masjid stood before it was demolished on 6 December 1992, will be divided into three parts: the site of the Ramlala idol to Lord Ram, Nirmohi Akhara gets Sita Rasoi and Ram Chabutara, Sunni Wakf Board gets a third.
The original Kashi Vishwanath Te
Kreisau Circle
The Kreisau Circle was a group of about twenty-five German dissidents led by Helmuth James von Moltke, who met at his estate in the rural town of Kreisau, Silesia. The circle was composed of men and a few women from a variety of backgrounds, including those of noble descent, devout Protestants and Catholics, professionals and conservatives. Despite their differences, the members of the Kreisau Circle found common interest in their opposition to Hitler's Nazi regime on both moral and religious grounds. At their meetings, the circle discussed how they would reorganize the German government after the end of the Third Reich. Although the circle did not promote violent overthrow of the regime, their planning was considered by the Nazis to be treasonous as it rested on the assumption that Germany would lose the war; the group began to falter after Helmuth von Moltke was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944 and came to an end when most of its members were arrested following Claus von Stauffenberg's attempt on Hitler's life on 20 July 1944.
The members of the Kreisau Circle were influenced by popular movements in Germany that followed World War I, most notably the German Youth Movement and German Religious Socialism. Although motivated by differing ideologies, each faction inspired resistance to the Nazi regime by encouraging their followers to reconsider traditionally rigid political and religious distinctions and engage in discourse with those who disagreed with them; these fundamental similarities created an environment that allowed for persons of a variety of backgrounds to meet and participate in intellectual resistance to the Third Reich. The German Youth Movement was characterized by the creation of various youth organizations that emphasized a return to nature beginning in 1896. For example, the Wandervogel, a youth movement that arose in the early 20th century, encouraged youth to reject their middle-class upbringings that overemphasized materialism; the movement stressed the importance of the individual and emboldened them to pursue their interests rather than follow traditional class expectations.
Many members of the German youth groups were sent to war in 1913. Following great losses during the war, young men found themselves fascinated with Volkish ideology, or the idea of reunification of the German people that transcended class distinctions. While this preoccupation with the Volk made for an easy transition for some into Nazi ideology, for others such as Helmuth von Moltke, their roots in a youth movement that questioned the status quo led them to resist a regime that undermined the freedom that they sought through their youth organizations. An extension of the German Youth Movement, the Löwenberger Arbeitsgemeinschaften was an organization of college professors, youth movement leaders, unemployed workers and farmers who came together to work in work camps and discuss social and political issues and solve the problems Silesia faced in the aftermath of WWI. Between the days of 14 March and 1 April 1928 one-hundred people from a variety of backgrounds came together for the first Silesian work camp.
In the mornings, participants would partake in physical labour. This was followed by lecture courses, discussion groups, leisure time. Two additional camps followed in 1929 and 1930. One participant described his time at the camps, "Representatives of the three social groups in the nation were able to achieve a common language that had proved beyond the grasp of the older generation. A group such as this, which formed a cross-section of the community, was capable of rising above class and party interests"; the camp allowed participants to cooperate with people of different upbringings and discuss how they could work together for the common good of their community. This lesson that people of differing social classes and political views could collaborate would influence Helmuth James von Moltke in his construction of the Kreisau Circle, who himself was an important contributor to the Löwenberger movement. Religious Socialism in 20th century Germany influenced the members of the Kreisau Circle; this movement is most notably characterized by the work of Paul Tillich, who sought to fashion socialism into an ideology, complimentary with Christian faith.
He looked to create “socialist political forms that were rooted in a religious substance”. Tillich called this socialism “theonomous”. Tillich emphasized the importance of social justice which he defined as "the demand for a society in which it is possible for every individual and for every group to live meaningfully and purposefully, a demand for a meaningful society". To the youth movements, religious socialism challenged conventional political divisions; the movement asked its followers not to focus on the differences between Christianity and socialism but rather see how the two could work together to create a better society. Harald Poelchau, a member of the Kreisau Circle, was a close follower of Tillich, other members such as Horst von Einsiedel, Carl Dietrich von Trotha, Adolf Reichwein, Adam von Trott zu Solz were affiliated with religious socialism; the Kreisau Circle was formed in 1940 with the merging of the intellectual circles of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenberg.
Moltke and Yorck were descendants of prominent Prussian nobility and therefore were favored by Hitler's regime. Helmuth von Moltke, for example, descended from Field Marshal von Moltke, a prominent military commander in the Bismarck era; the Nazis honored his family title by giving him a position in their High Command
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