September 6, 2025
The Power of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’
By Fay Voshell
Tyrannical regimes hate Christianity and the faithful who pray. Secular autocrats loathe prayer because it acknowledges a Being greater than any human authority. Since despots believe themselves to be autonomous and their power unlimited, any rival to their sovereignty becomes a target.
Scarcely anyone expressed contempt for the spiritual discipline of prayer more forcefully than Joseph Stalin, the former dictator of the Soviet Union. As the N.Y. Times reported in 1957, “it is related that Stalin, when advised of the Vatican’s attitude on European problems, inquired with a sneer, ‘And how many divisions does the pope have?’”
Author C. L. Sulzberger went on to add that such skepticism about the spiritual power of Christianity was nothing new. In the thirteenth century, the pope sent a delegation to Baichu, viceroy over Asia Minor, which was ruled by the Mongol Khans. The pope’s emissary, the Dominican Father Ezzelino, announced to the Mongols, “I am the legate of the pope, who is placed high above all the kings and princes of the world and who is honored by them as their lord and father.”
The Mongols laughed, asking Father Ezzelino how many territories the pope had conquered? “How many peoples had he subdued? Was his name dreaded between the eastern and western oceans like that of the great Genghis?”
Modern secular pundits and officials continue to sneer at the prayers of the faithful.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/09/the_power_of_thoughts_and_prayers.html
