Several days ago, thousands of Polish Catholics clutching rosary beads gathered at hundreds of locations along the country’s border for a mass demonstration against the secularization of the country and the spread of Islam’s influence in Europe. The event, commemorating the 1571 Naval Battle of Lepanto between Christians, under orders from the Pope, and the Ottoman Muslim Empire, was the second-largest prayer event in Europe after the 2016 World Youth Day.

Marek Jedraszewski, the archbishop of Krakow, said: “Let’s pray for other nations of Europe and the world to understand that we need to return to the Christian roots of European culture if we want Europe to remain Europe”.

The event sheds light on the ideological division separating two Europes. On April 25, 1945, on a bridge thrown over the Elbe, American soldiers on one side and Soviets on the other, shook hands. Then, for half a century, the river remained a political and ideological border.

The Elbe River is again a demographic, cultural, religious, social and political border. The Hungarians of PM Viktor Orbán, the Slovaks of PM Robert Fico and the Poles are separated from their Western brethen by a new iron curtain.

But where once there were barbed wire, red stars and kalashnikovs, keeping the populations separated, today there are ideas to separate the two Europes. The European West is democratic-liberal, multicultural, post-Christian and socially liberal. The European East is democratic-nonliberal, culturally homogeneous, traditional and still very Christian.

These Eastern Europeans resisted the Soviet Union's forced atheization of their societies for fifty years and their new nationalism, along with their opposition to Brussels' centralization, might be a response to this long historic cultural shock.

The European Union's beaurocrats, the liberal media and the progressive élite are whipping up a propaganda war to cast the Western Europeans, who favor unvetted Muslim migration, as cosmopolitan and tolerant, and the Eastern Europeans as “xenophobic” and “bigots”. The truth is somewhere else. No one else in Europe except these Eastern countries speak about defending “Christianity” and the danger of Islamization.

Not only that. As the American Catholic magazine First Things noted, “in Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, a pro-family, pro-life revolution and a rediscovery of Christian roots is occurring”.

If Western Europe has been infiltrated by the gender ideology and culture of death (mass euthanasia and abortion on demand), in Eastern Europe there is still strong opposition to the dismantling of the natural family and the attachment to a culture of life.

Last year, 51 Catholic priests were ordained in Slovakia. By comparison, in Germany, with 24 million Catholics (compared to only 3-4 million in Slovakia), only 58 priests were ordained in 2016. Religion is dying in the West and surviving in the East.

In Brussels they may not like it, but the last chance to save Europe’s Judeo-Christian roots might come from those who defeated the Ottomans in 1699 and now feel threatened by their heirs.