After the Anglo-Saxon nations gave thanks to their God for delivering them from the tyrannies of fascism, Nazism and imperial Japan, religion rapidly fell out of fashion. A new breed of academics—steeped in the false utopian doctrines of socialism courtesy of Mao’s little red book, flavored by the “God is dead” disciples of Nietzsche—became the “useful idiots” of powers intent on destroying the moral heart of Anglo-America.

By the 1970s they had largely succeeded. Hedonism, underpinned by a credit-based economy, replaced the Anglo-Saxon traditions of thrift and self-sacrifice for the good of all. The rise of feminism, a drug counterculture steeped in such mantras as espoused by pseudo-academic Timothy Leary—“turn on, tune in, drop out”—and the increasingly strident voices of the morally perverse via the homosexual and lesbian lobbies started to influence the minds of another generation. Capital and labor were at each other’s throats. The foreign policies of the United States and Britain lay in the tatters of confusion.

Then, in the late ’70s, along came a president, a prime minister and a pope—and together they changed the whole global scene.

An American B-grade movie star, a British grocer’s daughter, and a Polish priest combined their influence within their respective constituencies to create the catalyst that broke the hold of the Soviet Union on Eastern Europe.

Suddenly, the Berlin Wall came down. Nothing has been the same on the world scene since. Forty years of a great balance of power, within which reasonable stability and a certain level of global peace ensued, collapsed overnight on that fateful day of Nov. 9, 1989.

The Cold War was over. The U.S. strode the world like a colossus, the singular superpower to whom the whole world looked to police the globe and maintain the peace.

That was almost 19 years ago.

Look where the world is today.

What a waste!

Less than two decades following the greatest opportunity in its history, the U.S. is broke, morally corrupt at its core, seemingly rudderless in its foreign policy, the generally perceived pariah of the world, hated by all to almost the same degree as is the formerly brave and stoic little nation of Israel.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a grand strategy for global dominance currently plays out. It’s an identical strategy to that which has powerfully impacted the Anglo-Saxons three times over the past century and a half, about which those peoples remain largely ignorant at grave risk to the future of their national sovereignty. It’s a grand strategy, the effects of which we have been warning the British and American peoples about for over 70 years.

Believe it or not, rising up yet once more in the heartland of Europe is an ancient entity that has a history of brutal bloodletting extending back over the past two millennia! For 1,000 years of that history, its economic, political and military power has been Teutonic, its spiritual influence centered in Rome.

Historians call it “the Holy Roman Empire”!

Once, Herbert W. Armstrong was a lone voice crying out in a wilderness of the confusion in international relations seeking to warn of this resurrecting phenomenon. He gained his vision of the future from inerrant Bible prophecy. Few listened as he published and broadcast a message, beginning with the years leading up to World War ii and continuing right up to his death at the brink of the collapse of the Soviet Union, warning of the final resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire.

For over half a century before these events became a current-day reality, Herbert W. Armstrong prophesied the reunification of Germany and the rise of that nation to lead a combine of European states to world-power status, under the spiritual influence of Rome. He prophesied that the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon nations would coincide with the rise of that power as a global hegemon.

During the past two decades, Gerald Flurry has followed in Herbert Armstrong’s footsteps, tenaciously warning of the great tragedy that awaits the Anglo-Saxon nations in particular for their rebellion against their God, and the ultimate tragedy that awaits this world in the wake of the final resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire.

Two recent events have dramatically underscored the reality of the prophecies of both Herbert Armstrong and Gerald Flurry—one involving Germany, the other involving the religion of Rome.

First was the dramatic coup within the Social Democrat Party (spd). It was a veritable political blitzkrieg: Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former Vice Chancellor Franz Muntefering ousted party leader Kurt Beck; Steinmeier was propelled into the limelight as prime contender for the post of Germany’s chancellor, and Muntefering, a Steinmeier ally, returned to his former post as spd chairman. It was simply, and covertly, designed to push the pro-U.S. faction of Chancellor Angela Merkel into the political backwater, and bring the spd right-wing, pro-Russian cabal to the fore in German foreign policy.

This occurred during the process of state elections leading up to next September’s election for the German chancellorship.

The very fact that, within 24 hours of the Steinmeier-Muntefering coup, headlines appeared proposing that Merkel was being touted for a sideways “promotion” to a “senior EU post” indicated that the knives were out and Merkel’s political career within Germany was fated for a rapid end.

Added to this dramatic turn of events in German politics, two of Pope Benedict xvi’s recent tours have highlighted his papacy’s narrowing its focus onto preparing the scene for a blitzkrieg evangelizing of Europe.

During a visit to Sardinia on September 7, Benedict called for Catholic laypeople to step up their efforts in evangelizing the “the world of work, the economy [and] politics” (AsiaNews, September 7; emphasis mine throughout). That’s pretty well an all-embracing evangelizing agenda!

Rome has always been clever at carrying out its strategy of embedding Catholic laity in labor movements, government bureaucracy, the secret services and the legal profession. Now the pope is calling for those Catholics who hold positions of influence within society to heed the clarion call from Rome to saddle up for a new global crusade!

During his Sardinia speech, Benedict called for “a new generation of committed Christian laypeople capable of seeking with competency and moral rigor solutions of sustainable development” (ibid.). Those solutions, in the pope’s terms, must stem from the “cultural treasures” that the pope referred to in a more recent speech as the ancient monasteries of Catholicism embedded in Europe!

Hard on the heels of the Sardinia speech, Benedict sped to Europe’s most secular state, France, to begin garnering the wayward French nation back into Rome’s fold. In this effort, he recruited the support of France’s President Sarkozy, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. The way for the pope had been prepared by influential EU parliamentary President Hans-Gert Pöttering, who visited Sarkozy concurrently. A devout German Catholic, Pöttering has previously offered a standing invitation to Pope Benedict to come to Strasbourg and personally address the European Parliament.

With his visit to France last week coinciding with the anniversary of his controversial speech given in Regensburg, Germany, last September, the key phrase within his oration to this wayward French daughter of the church, given in Paris, juxtaposed cuttingly with a statement he made about Islam a year ago.

In the Regensburg speech, the pope sent a powerful message to global Islam by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor as declaring that the Prophet Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” By contrast, during his speech in Paris, Benedict declared that “Amid the great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of peoples and the emerging new political configurations, the monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived.”

Get the point? Benedict contends that the European culture is rooted in the ancient traditions of Rome, protected through the ancient monastic system of the Roman Catholic Church. It is that tradition, of the universality of the ancient religion of Rome, toward which Pope Benedict was inviting France, and by inference, the whole of Europe, to return. It is that religion which, alone, throughout its perpetually resurrecting history, was able to bind the diverse nations of Europe together each time the Holy Roman Empire arose in the past to dominate Europe and the world.

What we are witnessing through these recent key events in Europe is simply the old cycle of history repeating itself, just one more time. The final resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire is increasingly, and inevitably, asserting itself in European and global politics. The political events in Europe—especially Germany—in recent weeks, most particularly since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Georgia on August 8, overlaid with the words and actions of Pope Benedict xvi over the past year, have catapulted the final resurrection of that ancient Holy Roman Empire forward into a new aggressive phase.

You need to update your awareness of what is happening in Europe. These events are destined to affect every man, woman and child within the Anglo-Saxon nations in a way that will stagger their minds as to the swiftness of their happening and their overwhelmingly destructive power on the economies and the populations of the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand!

To get a clear perspective on just what is really occurring on the world scene today, why it is happening, and, most crucially, the time context, read our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy. It will lead you to understand the real meaning of the great global events that are occurring today. Events that are leading, beyond doubt, to a prophesied grand clash of civilizations that will be but the forerunner to the establishment of the greatest of civilizations ever known to man!