The other week I wrote about how the Roman Catholic Church’s game, from its inception, has been to convert through assimilation, adopting pagan peoples’ long-held traditions and rituals and deceptively integrating them into the Vatican’s “user-friendly” brand of Christianity.

Proof in point is in a recent New York Times journal entry from Macao—the birthplace of Catholicism in China and East Asia—that told how the Chinese coastal area’s gambling-fueled economic boom has led to a steep decline in church attendance as the population indulges in “a dizzying array of leisure and work choices.”

The Macao priests say the answer to this problem “might come in emulating the promotional flair of the casinos,” relates Donald Greenlees of the Times. “Father Rodriguez criticized priests for becoming too distant from the people they seek to serve: ‘What we need here are priests with public relations attitudes, like the casinos.”

Greenlees reminded readers that, historically, Rome has grappled with how to adapt to Chinese culture: “In the 18^th century, Augustinian and Jesuit priests were expelled from Macao in a dispute with the Vatican over the practice of allowing Chinese converts to Catholicism to maintain the tradition of ancestor worship.”

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Very interestingly, this same Times article reported that, according to the Holy See, Catholicism worldwide has grown 45% in the past 30 years and is “flourishing elsewhere in China, even while under the tight rein of the Communist government.”

“The size of the Beijing-authorized church is estimated at 7 million practitioners, but the underground church lifts that to at least 10 million, according to religion scholars,” confirms the Times. “Hong Kong has won converts, perhaps because of its high-profile cardinal, Joseph Zen, who has openly sided with the city’s democracy movement and marched in the streets in solidarity with democracy advocates.

“Dominic Yung, the director of social communication for the Hong Kong Diocese, said having a ‘very outspoken’ cardinal undoubtedly helped recruitment.”

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Another great tactic of the Catholic Church is to elevate ordinary men to “holy fathers” and endorse worship of them as intercessors and special spokesmen for God, able to absolve adherents of sin and guilt inside the confession booth.

While in east Texas over Thanksgiving, I saved a huge color spread from the Houston Chronicle showing the South’s extremely popular new Cardinal Daniel N DiNardo (the first cardinal from a Texas archdiocese) inside St. Peter’s Basilica, being awarded a red biretta by Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican’s “Mass of Rings” cardinal-induction ceremony.

Notice from the report how it’s all about the tantalizing of the five senses and the reverence of pomp and circumstance, beautiful buildings and colorfully garbed “men of the cloth”:

“Cheers from more than 500 travelers from the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston rang out in the basilica and in the audience hall. Hundreds lined up, some chanting DiNardo’s name, to shake hands with the new cardinal at parties held in his honor.

“In the end, at the first Mass he celebrated as a cardinal, DiNardo thanked the travelers for their ‘lively and Texan support.’

“And there were emotional moments. One hit 21-year-old Mandy MacDonald of Huntsville on her visit to St. Peter’s Basilica. ‘The church is so ornate and it’s so enormous and the pope is inside it,’ she said. ‘When I saw the pope, I stopped breathing.’ ”

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One of the most complicated books ever written by a human is Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons or the Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife, published in 1858.

Hislop’s exhaustive original research into the ancient Babylonian religions—looking at the tablets and other documents and translating them—traces paganism back to this one ancient goddess (the queen of heaven) dating from Nimrod who comes through history with eight or ten different names.

The same Virgin Mary of the Catholics was Venus to the Romans and Diana to the Greeks, who later called her Minerva. The Phoenicians called her Astarte, the Syrians called her Ashtoreth, the Egyptians called her Eister (for which the pagan holiday Easter stems).

Hislop writes, “The Roman Church maintains that it was not so much the seed of the woman, as the woman herself, that was to bruise the head of the serpent. In defiance of all grammar, she renders the Divine denunciation against the serpent thus: ‘She shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise her heel.’

“The same was held by the ancient Babylonians, and symbolically represented in their temples. In the uppermost story of the tower of Babel, or temple of Belus, Diodorus Siculus tells us there stood three images of the great divinities of Babylon; and one of these was of a woman grasping a serpent's head.

“Among the Greeks the same thing was symbolised; for Diana, whose real character was originally the same as that of the great Babylonian goddess, was represented as bearing in one of her hands a serpent deprived of its head.

“As time wore away, and the facts of Semiramis' history became obscured, her son's birth was boldly declared to be miraculous: and therefore she was called ‘Alma Mater,’ ‘the Virgin Mother.’

(Even in the mythology of our own Scandinavian ancestors, we have a remarkable evidence that Alma Mater, or the Virgin Mother, had been originally known to them. One of their gods called Heimdal, who is described in the most exalted terms, as having such quick perceptions as that he could hear the grass growing on the ground, or the wool on the sheep's back, and whose trumpet, when it blew, could be heard through all the worlds, is called by the paradoxical name, ‘the son of nine virgins.’)

“That the birth of the Great Deliverer was to be miraculous, was widely known long before the Christian era. For centuries, some say for thousands of years before that event, the Buddhist priests had a tradition that a Virgin was to bring forth a child to bless the world.

“That this tradition came from no Popish or Christian source, is evident from the surprise felt and expressed by the Jesuit missionaries, when they first entered Thibet and China, and not only found a mother and a child worshipped as at home, but that mother worshipped under a character exactly corresponding with that of their own Madonna, ‘Virgo Deipara,’ ‘The Virgin mother of God,’ and that, too, in regions where they could not find the least trace of either the name or history of our Lord Jesus Christ having ever been known.

“The primeval promise that the ‘seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head,’ naturally suggested the idea of a miraculous birth. Priestcraft and human presumption set themselves wickedly to anticipate the fulfilment of that promise; and the Babylonian queen seems to have been the first to whom that honour was given. The highest titles were accordingly bestowed upon her. She was called the ‘queen of heaven.’ (Jer 44:17,18,19,25).”