Spokesperson Explains What is Behind National Cathedral’s Name Change on Google Maps

Basilica News Agency – 7/5/2020

On Saturday, a lot of messages appeared online from the believers saddened to find that, when searching for the name “Cathedral of the Salvation of the Nation” on Android mobile devices, the Google Maps application returned the correct location of the site, but with an offensive title: ‘Cathedral of National Stupidity’.

The name of “Romanian People’s Salvation Cathedral” was chosen since the reign of King Ferdinand I, in memory of the liberation of the Romanian people and their union in a single country. The offense to this name is brought to the memory of those in whose honour the church was built, to those who have sacrificed their lives to achieve the goal of national independence and unity.

Numerous messages of outrage regarding this unfortunate situation were sent to the Basilica News Agency, mainly since Google usually checks very carefully the names of the locations it publishes.

The spokesman of the Romanian Patriarchate, Vasile Bănescu, commented on the situation.

‘The recent attack on the Google Maps name of the “National Cathedral”, which was built in memory of the best of this country’s people, its heroes, is another proof of the hatred of some who, with or without their will, end up composing some harsh anti-Christian / unorthodox ideological nuclei in Romania,” said Vasile Bănescu.

They react with hatred on Facebook only when reading the words: “Church”, “Cathedral”, “Orthodoxy”, dismantling them as if they were able to understand them truly, added Vasile Bănescu.

The Patriarchate’s Spokesperson described this attitude as an expression of a ‘spiritual pathology, grafted on the background already undermined by serious intellectual deficiencies, sheer lack of education and the progressive detachment from historical and immediate reality.’

“Who are these hateful people? What does recommend these “new people” morally, professionally or culturally, who are self-situated beyond good and evil with the stone always in their hand?”, asked Vasile Bănescu.

He said that the phenomenon reveals the survival in the post-communist society of the fascination of the socialist utopia “to overthrow of the Church of Christ”.

About these few, but very active and vocal people, for whom the fascination of the utopia of atheist socialism continues today in new forms, Vasile Bănescu said: “All these small and ridiculous self-improvised gods of ideological cardboard are suicidally animated by the principle of destroying the personal and public moral order woven and nourished by Christianity. The Christophobia of some people who end up committing the act of changing stealthily on Google Maps the name of a building that the Orthodox Church with the natural support of the Romanian State erects in memory of all the heroes in the history of this Christian country indicates a dangerous moral pathology that already does a lot of harm to Europe and the civilized world of Christianity over two millennia.”

Vasile Bănescu drew attention to the fact that atheism is always reborn in other forms, being only an ideological mask of the same “spirit of the world” contrary to the Spirit of Truth.

Photography courtesy of Basilica.ro / Iulian Dumitrașcu

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