Iceland’s New Temple to Norse Gods looks like Novus Ordo Church

Any similarities are pure coincidence…

Iceland’s New Temple to Norse Gods looks like Novus Ordo Church

Credit: Magnus Jensson

We have often mentioned that Novus Ordo churches look like pagan temples, and today we can report that pagan temples also look like Novus Ordo churches.

In February of 2015 it was announced that Iceland was getting ready to build its first temple to the country’s historic Pagan gods in more than 1,000 years. These plans are beginning to take on concrete shape now. As the Nordic edition of Business Insider reports, a new idolatrous temple is being erected on behalf of the Asatru Society (Hof Ásatrúarfélagsins) for the worship of Odin and Thor, two of the gods of Norse mythology. Construction is currently underway, and completion of the edifice is expected by the end of the year.

The image above is a rendition of the anticipated final product. Let’s face it: The fact is that if someone had told you that this building was a Novus Ordo church, you would have believed it — because it’s virtually indistinguishable from one, at least on the outside.

Additional images of the project can be found at the web site of the architectural firm.

How will Club Francis react? Probably not at all. Perhaps they will simply be glad to have a new conversation partner for their interreligious dialogue and a new participant to invite to the next Assisi peace prayer meeting. The entire Vatican II Church is gradually moving towards neo-gnostic, neo-pagan nature worship anyway. We recall that in November of 2014, the Benedict XVI appointee “Cardinal” Francesco Ravasi participated in a pagan rite of adoration of the mother earth goddess Pachamama:

• Laudato Si in Action: “Cardinal” Ravasi worships Earth Goddess

Francis’ environmentalist encyclical Laudato Si’ didn’t help in that regard. Shortly after the document’s publication, by the way, a televised Canadian Novus Ordo “Mass” closed with a hymn to “Beautiful Gaia, calling us home”. The diocese ended up apologizing and promised that this would not happen again, but only after an outcry had been raised on the internet over the scandal.

“Pope” Francis is always busy denouncing all sorts of quasi-idolatries (of money, of freedom, of self, etc.), but when it comes to idolatry in its proper sense — the literal worship of the creature rather than the Creator — he falls curiously silent and encourages Pagans in their unhappy state. Remember?

• Francis stands up for the Rights of Tradition – Pagan Tradition, of course!
• “Meeting God in different Ways”: Francis boldly promotes One-World Religion

As far as Paganism and interreligious dialogue are concerned, let us never forget the following anecdote from the Church’s treasury of saints. St. Boniface Winfrid, Apostle of Germany, once had the following “encounter” with the indigenous heathens:

To show the heathens how utterly powerless were the gods in whom they placed their confidence, Boniface felled the oak sacred to the thunder-god Thor, at Geismar, near Fritzlar. He had a chapel built out of the wood and dedicated it to the prince of the Apostles. The heathens were astonished that no thunderbolt from the hand of Thor destroyed the offender, and many were converted. The fall of this oak marked the fall of heathenism.

(Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Boniface”)

This is the very Thor the adherents of the Asatru Society in Iceland will be worshipping in their new temple later this year. St. Boniface, madly in love with the true God, put aside all human respect and refuted the Pagans’ false gods by cutting down their “sacred oak”. And it worked! His action produced conversions in abundance. This is the fruit of proselytism and triumphalism!

Can you imagine what “Pope” Francis would have said if he had been around back then to witness this? Not only would he have denounced the saint for disrespecting the cultural traditions of the indigenous and offending their religious sensibilities, he also would have complained about the unnecessary cutting down of a healthy tree God created for our “common home”, clearly another example of that “culture of waste” promoted by selfish man lording it over creation. Francis would still be yelling at St. Boniface today for putting up walls instead of building bridges!

The truth is that Francis worships man, not God. Like the Freemasons, he is concerned about the rights of man, not about the rights of God. But 118 years ago already, Pope Leo XIII lamented: “The world has heard enough of the so-called ‘rights of man’. Let it hear something of the rights of God” (Encyclical Tametsi Futura, n. 13).

Paganism, whether in its ancient or more modern versions, is a mortal sin against the First Commandment:

I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them….

(Exodus 20:2-5)

Unfortunately, the history of the Old Testament is filled with stories of how the Chosen People defected into idolatry time and again. God punished this sin harshly even before the advent of grace. How much more will He punish it today! The following scriptural verses are very pertinent:

For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens. (Ps 95:5)

And I will pour upon you clean water, and you shall be cleansed from all your filthiness, and I will cleanse you from all your idols…. Nor shall they be defiled any more with their idols, nor with their abominations, nor with all their iniquities: and I will save them out of all the places in which they have sinned, and I will cleanse them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. (Ez 36:25; 37:23)

But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true adorers shall adore the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father also seeketh such to adore him. God is a spirit; and they that adore him, must adore him in spirit and in truth. (Jn 4:23-24)

Jesus saith to him: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me. (Jn 14:6)

Wherefore, my dearly beloved, fly from the service of idols. (1 Cor 10:14)

You know that when you were heathens, you went to dumb idols, according as you were led. (1 Cor 12:2)

And the rest of the men, who were not slain by these plagues, did not do penance from the works of their hands, that they should not adore devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood, which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: neither did they penance from their murders, nor from their sorceries, nor from their fornication, nor from their thefts. (Apoc 9:20-21)

Blessed are they that wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb: that they may have a right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and unchaste, and murderers, and servers of idols, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie. (Apoc 22:14-15)

The paganization we are witnessing today is possible to a large extent only because of the collapse of Catholicism initiated by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. As tragic and abominable as it is, however, it is important always to keep in mind that the collapse of Christendom is not some unforeseen circumstances that signals the defeat of Christianity and the destruction of the Catholic Church. Rather, in the world’s apostasy and especially its return to Paganism, we are but witnessing the fulfillment of prophecy, as described in the Apocalypse:

And there came one of the seven angels, who had the seven vials, and spoke with me, saying: Come, I will shew thee the condemnation of the great harlot, who sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication; and they who inhabit the earth, have been made drunk with the wine of her whoredom. And he took me away in spirit into the desert. And I saw a woman sitting upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was clothed round about with purple and scarlet, and gilt with gold, and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of the abomination and filthiness of her fornication.

(Apoc 17:1-4)

The fornication and whoredom spoken of here are a common biblical metaphor for unfaithfulness to God, specifically idolatry. Thus, for example, the prophet Nahum declared: “Because of the multitude of the fornications of the harlot that was beautiful and agreeable, and that made use of witchcraft, that sold nations through her fornications, and families through her witchcrafts” (Nah 3:4).

That ancient Paganism should make a comeback in our time, even if modified a little, is actually not surprising. In an increasingly complex intercultural world of no borders or boundaries, people are yearning for a sense of identity and belonging. But having turned Catholicism into little more than a be-nice-to-each-other creed with bad liturgy, the Novus Ordo Sect has nothing substantial to set against it. Such people are desperately looking for something to hold on to and find it in their heathen roots. It will be their undoing: “But the things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God. And I would not that you should be made partakers with devils” (1 Cor 10:20).

Expect, then, to see an increase in evil: sorcery, witchcraft, Pagan sacrifices, abortion, promiscuity, open devil worship. This alone will be bad enough — but then consider also the divine punishment that will follow it. We must take great care to live holy lives, cultivating always the gift of sanctifying grace in our souls, so that we will, by the grace of God, be counted worthy to receive the sign of God on our foreheads and thus be spared God’s just wrath (see Apoc 9:4; cf. Apoc 7:3-16).

It seems we are heading towards the prophesied end in great haste. What is still missing is the false messiah for the apostate Jews — the Antichrist — and the re-establishment of the old sacrifices in a rebuilt Jewish temple in Jerusalem. But they’ve been working on that:

• Sanhedrin Launched In Tiberias (Arutz Sheva, 2004)
• Jewish Sanhedrin Re-Established (Tradition in Action, 2004)
• Members of Reestablished Sanhedrin Ascend Temple Mount (Arutz Sheva, 2004)
• Rabbis attempt to resume animal sacrifices on the Temple Mount (Israel Today, 2007)
• Jews in Israel Preparing for Service in the Rebuilt Jewish Temple (Watchman Newsletter, 2009)
• Temple Groups Practice Passover Sacrifice (Arutz Sheva, 2013)
• Sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb Returns to Jerusalem After Millennia (Breaking Israel News, 2016)
• In first, sheep slaughtered in Jerusalem Old City in reenactment of Passover sacrifice (The Times of Israel, 2017)

“I am come in the name of my Father, and you receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him you will receive” (Jn 5:43).

By the way: The location of the Pagan temple to Odin and Thor is Öskjuhlíð, a hill in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. But don’t think Iceland is first in building a new idolatrous temple in our times. Denmark was faster.

Lord, have mercy!

Image source: magnus.jensson.is (Magnus Jensson)
License: Fair use